Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present Christian Giroux & Daniel Young in their third solo exhibition with the gallery. Giroux & Young have worked collaboratively since 2002, producing sculpture, public art and film installations. Their work circumscribes an on-going conversation concerning the modernity of the mid-century, industrial fabrication methods and the construction of space.
Beta Boole constitutes the second generation of sculptures involving Ikea furniture and sheet metal boxes. This new body of work is both technically and formally more ambitious. It takes its cues from both the continuous interchange between architecture and post Minimalist product design, as well as from the dialogue Matta-Clark initiated with his ‘Cuttings’, creating negative spaces within the built environment. Colliding objects from the domestic realm with an industrial mode of manufacturing, the world of the commodity and the component, Beta Boole exists in conversation with the spirit of contemporary modernism and its computer-driven forms. The term Boole is derived from the basic 3D computer modeling operation of adding and subtracting simple forms to generate more complex ones. These pieces of furniture provide both a recognizable and vernacular set of domestic forms, which perversely realize the Modernist goal of universal design through the machinations of globalization.
The first series of Boole sculptures were exhibited at Diaz Contemporary in 2008. Derived in part from repeated viewings of Brancusi’s workshop and an exhibition of the projects of the Japanese architecture practice of SANNA, these works began with a table as a formal and structural basis. The works in this series negotiated between the kinds of intuitive formal transformations and transitions (as exemplified within the structures, pedestals and furniture) of Brancusi’s studio and a Minimalist strategy of exercising systematic permutations or sequences of geometric, industrial forms.
Christian Giroux & Daniel Young are currently artists in residences at the York University Digital Sculpture Lab. Giroux is also a professor at the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph. Their work has been shown at Scope Miami Beach (2004), Ace Art Inc (Winnipeg, 2004), The Power Plant (Toronto, 2006), the EXiS festival (Seoul, 2009), and The Museum Fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2009). Giroux and Young also recently received the Lee Center Sculpture Commission from the City of Toronto for Reticulated Gambol (2007-2008). Their first film installation Every Building… was shown at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto in 2009. Followed by 50 Light Fixtures from Home Depot, which opened at Mercer Union, Toronto in January (2010), the Forum Expanded of the Berlinale, Berlin in February, and will be installed at EXiS festival, Seoul in September, as well as at Hallwalls, Buffalo for Beyond/In Western New York.
This work was made possible by the support of York University’s Digital Sculpture Lab, Triple Metal Products, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council.
 
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