Trevor Mahovsky
If I Told You Once I Told You A Million Times
June 28–July 27, 1996

This exhibition, featured several hundred of Tony Mahovsky’s ongoing series of drawings and paintings; it was installed as a kind of obsessive salon hanging of one artist’s work and working process. Mahovsky produces a painting or drawing every day (sometimes every hour); “inspirations” for his work range from the sublime to the banal, ie. his ‘Pontiac Acadian’ to the ‘Apollo 11 moon landing’. To document the special demands his rigorous process entails, the artist makes a journal entry detailing each work as it is completed: materials, time, date and particular circumstances of production. The combination of the artist’s drawings and written journals combine to create a perpetual, unfinished diary that “races through time, place and myth on personal, cultural, and art historical levels.” Past work, as it is recorded in the journals, becomes an ersatz history upon which all of the artist’s future work is built. In his obsessive repetition of images and phrases in throughout the work, Mahovsky also attempts to introduce “a new lexicon of visual and written language”.