June 22 – August 11, 2013
“The sculptures arrive in an all-too material manner, off-gassing as the modalities of a transparent radiation.” Notes on Navigating the Studio at Night, David Armstrong Six Drawing on the tradition of Cubism, Surrealism and other Modernist artistic precedents which include the conceptual turn toward Minimalism and forms of assemblage and abject object-making in the 1960s and 1970s, David Armstrong Six’s contemporary explorations into sculpture’s “expanded field” apply a diverse range of raw and readymade materials compiled into aesthetically intriguing and ambiguously legible compositions. This exhibition presents a selection of new pieces created by the artist during a 2012 residency in Berlin that saw the realization of an ambitious group of vertically-oriented sculptures known collectively as “Brown Star Plus One.” Individually titled after particular yet generic vocations and characters – from the labouring “Janitor” to the anomalous “Changeling” – the identification of humanly-accessible traits only occurred in retrospect, as the outcome of slow and lengthy “trial-and-error” juxtapositions and the assembly or disassembly of materials without a specific endpoint in mind. Armstrong Six calls this method of deliberation over sculpture’s formal and material possibilities “associative abstraction,” a process that he engaged in late at (and throughout the) night within the space of his Kreuzberg studio after long walks through the streets and sounds of Berlin.
Curated by David Liss and Jonathan Shaughnessy
Opening Reception
Friday June 21, 8 – 10 pm
Programming
Curator and Artist Talks Saturday June 22, 3 pm Join artists Barbara Astman, David Armstrong Six, and Jonathan Shaughnessy, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Canada, for a tour of the exhibitions.
