In October 2023, Weppler and Mahovsky ran collaborative workshops at Marshview Middle School and the Owens Art Gallery, during which participants made single-line drawings, small relief sculptures, and imitative soundscapes based on the theme “water connects all living things.”
Upon returning to their Toronto studio, the artists photographed these drawings and digitally stitched them into a single, looped drawing. They also cast participants’ sculptures in ice, filming each one as it melted into a puddle of water. Through this process, the sculptures were transformed into monumental icebergs. In the video, each ice sculpture seems to rise like an apparition from an inky black sea, only to melt again, suggesting both the beginning and end of the world.
The soundtrack for the video was performed by the artists and workshop participants using handmade, provisional instruments to create wave, rain, and stream symphonies. As music of the most ancient and fundamental kind—an imitation of nature—this score echoes the primordial character of the simplified ice forms seen in the video.
These various elements, along with documentary footage from the workshops, hint at the complexities and struggles of the collaborative process and the give-and-take of trading knowledge, time, and things. The artists’ remaking and melting of the participants’ contributions is balanced against the care taken to document the symbols they created, thus offering them a shimmering afterlife.
The title of the project is taken from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972), in which scientists studying a mysterious ocean planet encounter apparitions of people from their past, who mysteriously appear aboard their space station. Produced from the memory of the scientists, these apparitions bring up intense feelings of love and regret. On the surface of the watery planet, islands begin to form, also seemingly made from memories.