David Armstrong Six
"David Armstrong Six" by Ben Portis, Summer 2010, pp. 104-106
David Armstrong Six’s anti–form fit installation The Dry Salvages took over Parisian Laundry’s idiosyncratic back gallery, which is known as the Bunker— a raw, windowless concrete box accessed via a subterranean passageway. A pink nylon line tied from end to end issued the artist’s creative claim on the room’s inherent condition. Armstrong Six named the piece after the third of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and took inspiration from the poet’s 1941 masterwork, a mid-life meditation in which grains of truth emerge from and dissolve into oceans of retrospection.
Eliot’s transformation-by-water theme was apparent; the installation resembled the aftermath of a flood. A sturdy-looking faux-concrete pillar and its compounded architectonic elaboration (an homage to the Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith, who figures in other of the artist’s recent works) served as dislodged piers to which detritus clung.
These articles seemed random. Their arrangement did not; it was as if a since-departed survivor had sought refuge, order and hope by sorting the odd stuff at hand, which included battered no-name cans cast in plaster and painted (cat food, coleslaw, baked beans), broken slates, cheap decorative glassware (vases, decanters, candlesticks), pieces of mirror and Plexiglas variously cut and broken, green cellophane, mulch, felt and foam padding, an ornamental pineapple carved from wood, flannel pillowcases and two stacks of Interview magazines.
The aforementioned nylon line, strung above the embankments, perhaps indicated a high-water mark. A long bamboo pole lashed to the pillar hoisted a listless silver flag made from a foil emergency blanket above its level. The gallery’s distressed walls seemed to have been eroded by the same forces that ostensibly tossed the debris. Within this sombre grey space, each bit of the installation fl ashed a little light and colour. Visual surface effects vied with substance, and often prevailed. Material properties traditionally considered intrinsic to sculpture proved elusive, deceptive or provisional.
Armstrong Six’s forlorn, contingent crisis environment elicited cautious appreciation and uncomfortably cast the spectator as trespasser. This is in contrast with the aloof interactive permission implicit in the installations of the artist’s Toronto colleague Scott Lyall, or, going well back, the psycho-symbolic mysteries enshrined in Joseph Beuys’s abandoned set pieces. Armstrong Six offers his own brand of offhand austerity. The recurring motif of applied stripes (painted, taped and folded) pointed to another artistic precursor, Daniel Buren, who, like Armstrong Six, extracts latent narratives from his exhibition sites.
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