Imitation is flattery most sincere, thus the work of Rhonda Weppler is an homage to things. Like any homage, it is necessarily done at a remove – from a distance, so to speak. That distance can be precisely measured by calculating the gap between plain things and sculptures. In Weppler’s case we might estimate it to be somewhere around half a millimetre.

Plain things are rarely plain of course – objects usually receive copious psychical and emotional investment. This is true even when the things are not wanted: walk through Value Village and see. But there is perhaps no category of object that elicits pathos more than that which gives itself up as an illusion. How sad an object is that can only pretend to be. Yet illusions are also somehow infinitely better than that which they simulate precisely because they are marvelous and dreamlike.

Sometimes terrible illusions are the most spectacular. A terrible illusion is one so difficult to create that the labour of the making becomes the subject of the illusion: painful or clumsy effort there for all to see. But such an investment of labour sometimes creates a will to believe on the part of the spectator. Certain people experience Doctor Who in this manner. In these special cases the spectator is compelled to imaginatively match the labour of the maker. The result is not belief but something else: an uncomfortable sense that one’s imagination is both powerful and easily abused.

This is not to suggest that Weppler’s illusions are terrible. Yet they are laborious, and despite their painstaking fabrication they flaunt their incompleteness to varying degrees. In this fashion they position themselves as artworks – that special category of objects that dramatize their own construction. Weppler’s artworks accept the necessity of the discrete display space, an exemplary world that exists by virtue of the quotidian on the other side of half a millimetre of white paint. Within this frame, the self-conscious display of Weppler’s labour is also transfigured into something exemplary: a substitute for the narratives that inevitably spring from psychical investment in things.

Of course artworks too are subject to processes of nostalgic or romantic projection, usually manifest as narratives built around a glorification of the artist’s handiwork. While Weppler’s sculptures implicitly acknowledge this, they do enlist her labour within the service of the replica and the illusion, wherein the trace of her hand helps to engender a sense that one’s imagination is easily abused.