Rhonda Weppler / Trevor Mahovsky
Convenience / Twilight

Skymning

2022
acrylic, wood, acetate, tape, and LED lights
10 × 10 × 8 feet
 
Installation: Örebro, Sweden
 
Commissioned for OpenArt 2022

Skymning is a DIY public artwork in a pop-up structure, containing delicate, taped-together monuments to everyday things. Inspired by the folk-art lanterns made for lantern festivals such as Basel’s Fasnacht, Skymning is a lantern made to mimic an antique store, in homage to the small businesses in Öbrero, including those only existing in memory. The transparent store contains lanterns which look like vintage objects are assembled into a glowing cornucopia that hails out to passers-by in the same manner as a backlit advertisement. Each lantern was made by photographing every side of an object collected by the artists. The artists printed these images, then cut, folded and taped them together to give them the shape of real things. Many of the objects, such as a Mora Clock and a Swedish Post Box, speak to the Swedish context. Amidst the shelves can also be found objects collected for past iterations of the store that were staged in Washington, DC and Toronto, ON under the moniker Twilight: the project functions as an evolving archival document of its own history. At an end of exhibit event, the store went dark as the lanterns were given away. Carried off by new owners, the wares of Skymning dispersed like fireflies.