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David Armstrong Six, "The Law of the Excluded Middle". Installation view, Sporobole, Sherbrooke.

“In my beginning is my end.”
T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

With The Law of the Excluded Middle, a new work created simultaneously for Red Bull 381 Projects in Toronto and Sporobole in Sherbrooke, Quebec, David Armstrong Six continues his investigation of sculpture as a philosophical proposition born out of an encounter with quotidian form.

The central component to each site is a large winding line, made of laminated wood and painted in the subtle hues of gasoline, the design of which is based loosely on the flight pattern of flies.

This nonsensicle line represents a journey, which proclaims that there are no formal conditions for success while proffering no conclusions. It simply announces, without a beginning or an end, the parameters of a composition that is tangentially punctuated by cast, carved and fabricated replicas of quotidian detritus (no-name cans, parking lot stops, magazines etc.) alongside the readymade presence of industrial products such as fluorescent lights and silver tape.

The effect is one of turning the origin of these forms, by the sum of their parts and the nature of their cultural gestures, into an autonomous zone of indistinction such that they combine to form an entropic mud.

Armstrong Six thus conflates the idea of the law of the excluded middle, which states: “that for any proposition, that proposition is in itself true or it is true by its own negation”. Rather he affirms, in a simple manner, the presence of the individual as a possible encounter with illegible form governed by the ephemeral.

In tandem with the sculptural component of the exhibition a series of new spray-paintings have been produced for the show which extend the principle of double negation.