lie down with holograms

“Longing leads out far too often into vagueness” —Rainer Maria Rilke

For his first solo exhibition at Bradley Ertaskiran, David Armstrong Six premieres a new body of sculptural work composed entirely in basswood and charred basswood.

Evolving out of a studio-based activity predicated on daily experimentation and intuitive thinking, the new sculptures are the result of what the artist indexes as “a protracted conceptual arc”, suspended over the course of the past four years.

What finally arrives as the work, gets “rehearsed” in the studio, often through drawing and writing, as speculations upon gesture, seriality, mutability, and perception. There is a capricious curiosity aggregated by the artist over time, towards the build, and surrender, to muscle-memory.

Precedents may be gleaned from the postmodern choreography of Merce Cunningham, who often relied on dancers’ deeply ingrained physical memory of movements, allowing them to perform complex, sometimes seemingly random sequences with fluidity and precision. Or, from the late 19th century photographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey, whose attempts to study movements in air were articulated by the propulsion of smoke through wind tunnels.

The artist defers to the freestanding and wall-based sculptures as “creatural flows within an omnidirectional book of longing”. Installed as a scenographic envelope within the main gallery, lie down with holograms thus generates a pliable script, which invites the viewer into a collaborative dimension of interference wavelengths, apparition, and experiential play. There is no fixed symbolism or vantage point here. Rather, the sculptures reveal entity incrementally; both individually and collectively, as nascent matter, in a perpetual state of becoming.

David Armstrong Six (b. 1968, Belleville, ON) lives and works in Montreal. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1997, including at Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Nikolaj Kunsthall Gallery (Copenhagen), during the Quebec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal) as well as at White Columns (New York). He has also presented his work in solo exhibitions at the Darling Foundry (Montreal), the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto) and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin). In 2011, he was a finalist for the Prix Louis-Comtois. Armstrong Six’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Global Affairs Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Hart House Collection – University of Toronto, among others. For the past five years, David Armstrong Six has been working on public sculpture commissions in cast bronze: most notably les passagers, which were recently installed at the Brossard station on the REM train line in Greater Montréal.

The artist would like to extend heartfelt thanks to Iliana, Léa, Aimée, Ji-Yoon, Patti, Maude, Julia, Zena, Tony, Patrick, James, Abbas, Eli, and Tim. Bradley Ertaskiran is thrilled to present this new body of provocative work, which is the artist’s first solo exhibition since Night School in 2019 at Fonderie Darling.

To consult the artist’s profile, please click here.