Rick Leong & David Armstrong Six: Take Two
Rick Leong The Journey 2010 / photo Guy L'Heureux
Mystical views of nature meet demystified icons of the man-made world in new paintings by Rick Leong and fresh sculptural constructions by David Armstrong Six at Montreal’s Parisian Laundry.
In the gallery’s main space, Leong’s exhibition “I Am Nature” invites viewers into a supernatural forest realm where twisting trees support a dense overgrowth of flora and fauna. Painted in soft hues of moonlight blue and luminescent green, Leong’s canvases suggest a submerged dream world, a place of otherworldly encounters.
Rick Leong Lichen Owl 2009 / photo Guy L'Heureux
Armstrong Six has a track record of creating process-based installations as sites for the viral deconstruction of monolithic architectural and cultural forms. Early works like The Soup or Leak Into Space infected gallery structures with an oozing mix of “junk liquids” like glue, syrup and sand. A recent installation at Goodwater in Toronto took on venerable sculptural mythologies in a floor-to-ceiling fluorescent light work that purposefully obstructed the gallery space.
In “The Dry Salvages,” the work currently on show in Montreal, Armstrong Six turns a critical eye to modernist form and everyday life with a mock minimalist sculpture—built from plywood deceptively covered in grey concrete—that has been gradually “contaminated” with magazines, foam, glass vases and mirrors, among other commonplace objects. It calls to mind the aftermath of cultural legacies where the iconic forms and mass detritus of modernism have washed up together, forming an accumulated flotsam and jetsam of the material world. (3550 St-Antoine O, Montreal QC)
David Armstrong-Six The Dry Salvages 2010 / photo Guy L'Heureux
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