Arts Prof In the News
December 12, 2011 - In the News
Prof. Christian Giroux of the School of Fine Art and Music was featured recently in a story in the Toronto Star.
The article highlights the unique artistic partnership between Giroux and Daniel Young, his longtime collaborator. The two recently won the prestigious Sobey Award for contemporary art, which highlights contemporary art and the country’s best young artists.
Giroux and Young use consumer goods and industrial components to create sculpture and installation pieces. They created Reticulated Gambol, a permanent fixture in the new Lee Centre Park in Scarborough, Ont. Another exhibit shown at parks, beaches and boardwalks around Miami invited visitors to enter and explore an eight-foot-high “molecule” called Fullerene. The pair also created a collection of space satellites with the help of John Phillips, a design engineer in U of G’s School of Engineering. One satellite was featured in Contemporary magazine. Giroux and Phillips also designed a sculpture and printmaking course allowing students to create 3D artworks.
Giroux, a U of G professor since 2004, has exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows at Hunter College in New York, AceArt in Winnipeg and the PowerPlant in Toronto. He has been an artist-in-residence in Berlin and Paris.
Last year, he received funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to create Ontario’s first digital haptic lab in the School of Engineering. Here, artists and engineers can visualize and design functional components and complex forms for 3D construction using prototyping tools.
