We stopped by Redbull 381 Projects in Toronto last night to take in an intriguing installation by Montreal artist David Armstrong Six, titled The Law of the Excluded Middle.

David Armstrong Six, The Law of the Excluded Middle. All images: VoCA

The sculpture is a sprawling, highly-calculated junk pile comprising glass, flourescent tubes, paint cans, electrician’s tape, walnuts and car bumpers. But it is also a sophisticated play between the fake and the authentic, the matter-of-fact and the deceptive, the banal and the preciously handmade.

The thing we enjoyed most was how the sculpture was laid out. Spatially, it just asked to be explored, in the way that Six has laid out the rays of tape, and the flourescent tubes were spun away from the sculpture’s centre. (Each double tube held one daylight flourescent and a classic one.)

Curator Nick Brown pointed out the reflections in the glass panel – what he called the crux of the piece – which refers simultaneously to what appears to be and what is.  After looking at it a while, we realized the glass panel is ever-so-slightly crooked.

The paint cans are, in fact, plaster casts of real cans and the jagged rod running through the piece was made from basic wooden doweling cut and re-pieced together so that it contorted in a way that felt highly enegetic – reflecting the lights – but also sort of pointless.

At the centre of the piece were numerous walnuts scattered about, further reinforcing the natural, set against the parking lot car bumpers, which were man-made, too.

Created together with the sculpture was a series of new spray-paintings that are intended to “extend the principle of double negation,” according to the exhibition information, but they were purposely unlit and didn’t seem, to us, necessary.

Check it out!

Red Bull 381 Projects, Toronto, HERE.