26 November 2011 to 7 January 2012
Opening Saturday 26 November from 3 to 6

Young & Giroux
Andersson

In celebration of Young & Giroux winning the 2011 Sobey Art Award, we are pleased to present Andersson.

Andersson is a series of 13 individual sculptures, in which a standard IKEA step stool is divided into 12 spatial sections, with each stool receiving 3-5 of these sections as formed powder coated aluminum components. The works are a compositional play between an everyday household object and the reminiscent modernist content of IKEA’s designs. 

Andersson is part of a larger body of work loosely titled ‘Boole’, in which Young & Giroux created sculptures from precision fabricated sheet metal forms developed in a formal dialogue with pieces of IKEA furniture that are modified with industrial cutting processes.  The resulting works are hybrid forms that collide objects from the domestic realm with an industrial mode of manufacturing, exploring the implications of these processes on our relationship with our material surroundings.

Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have been making art together since 2002. They produce sculpture, public art and film installations. Their work is the product of an ongoing conversation concerning the modernity of the mid-century, and the production of space. Young and Giroux rework modernist forms of abstraction using consumer goods and industrial prototyping methods, construction systems and componentry to produce sculptural objects that partake in contemporary material discourse. Their film works constitute a form of research on sculptural form in the built environment from the architectural to the domestic scale.

Their work is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as part of the Sobey Art Award exhibition. Recently, their work has been shown at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2011); the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2010); Mercer Union, Toronto (2010); the Akademie der Kunst through Forum Expanded, at the Berlin Film Festival (2010); Prefix ICA (2009); and The Museum Fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2009).

This year, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery also published a catalogue of their work, entitled Young & Giroux. Their first in-depth monograph, it provides a career overview as well as an exploration of their project Beta Boole, and features essays by Kenneth Hayes, Jesse Huisken and Mark Lanctôt. Young & Giroux have an up coming solo exhibition at Oakville Galleries in September 2012.  Daniel Young is currently the Canada Council Artist in Residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin.