Mr Smith by Daniel Young and Christian Giroux
Mr. Smith is an award winning sculptural installation by Daniel Young & Christian Giroux created as a reference to the late American sculptor & visual artist Tony Smith. The 13 feet high sculpture is built out of wooden struts & panels and aluminium joints. Young and Giroux love the idea of utilizing basic, readily available materials and objects that can be easily found at a nearby Home Depot store or IKEA, which makes their works very interesting and at the same time invokes a sense of curiosity. “It’s about making the viewer a little bit more aware of their own body as they move around the work,” – says Christian Giroux. “Mr. Smith is also intended to be fun. It lends itself to a kind of imaginative play in one’s mind about how else it could be configured. It’s not the final form itself which is as important as the possibility that it could take an endless number of forms.”
“Tony Smith described his individual sculptural works as instantiations of a ‘spatial matrix’, an underlying mathematical and geometrical basis to the material world. Developed as a building system in varying degrees by Alexander Graham Bell and Buckminster Fuller, The system consists of a Tetrahedral grid that theoretically expands endlessly in all directions (Smith employed other geometric systems as well). Made of laminated plywood struts, triangular panels and cast aluminium joints, the piece privileges the idea of the system as much as the final sculptural form. Mr. Smith is a kit for making sculptures that adhere to Smiths spatial sense without directly quoting any of his completed works. The sculpture attempts to contribute to a material discourse of space frame systems through the design of a joint that maintains the integrity of the system while accepting either a strut or a panel in the completion of a form. This allows us the latitude to alternate between an emphasis on either surface plane or structure while playing with positive and negative space.”
+ Daniel Young & Christian Giroux
