22 November 2008 to 17 January 2009

James Carl
Jalousie

Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present new work by James Carl, in his first commercial solo exhibition in Canada. Carl is known for his uncommon use of common materials. In this series of works, his exploration of the material world takes on new visual form.

jalousie is the working title for a series of sculptures that Carl began making in 2005 in Paris. The works are constructed from venetian blinds — referred to as "jalousie" in colloquial French and German. As with much of Carl's work, these sculptures explore the possibilities for visual encounter: probing the normal, the moral, and the all-toocommon, in a spirit of compliance and conversation.

Various conventional negative attributes confront each other in the new work: the ostensibly negative status of craft in fine art discourse, for example, is woven into conversation with modernist sculpture's characteristic negative space. The works exploit abstraction as a historically grounded formal vocabulary. Their organic geometries cross paths somewhere between Sol Lewitt and Henry Moore.