MONTREAL.- Toronto duo Young & Giroux unveiled a brand-new work as part of an exhibition specially produced for the Musée. The Musée d’art contemporain presents Young & Giroux from February 3 to April 25, 2011.

In their works, Daniel Young and Christian Giroux re-examine mid-twentieth-century modernism, the production of space and the built environment. They rework the abstract forms associated with this modernism by taking consumer products and items related to design and industrial production techniques and using them to create sculptures that evoke theories of contemporary architecture.

For this show, Young and Giroux have extended their artistic investigation with a new piece titled Mr. Smith: a monumental modular sculpture inspired by the work of American artist Tony Smith (1912-1980) in which they give visual form to the structural logic of Smith’s minimalist sculptures and utilize the formal potential of the modular, near-architectural nature of his work. Accompanying the sculpture is their 2008 film Every Building, or Site, That a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006, which arises out of an exploration of the sculptural forms that underlie the urban environment. The 14-minute film reveals a succession of shots documenting, at a rate of 8 seconds per shot, 112 sites for which building permits were issued in Toronto in 2006.

Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have collaborated since 2002 on sculptures, public artworks and film installations. In recent years, their work has been shown at Scope Miami Beach (2004), Ace Art Inc. in Winnipeg (2004), The Power Plant in Toronto (2006), the EXiS Festival in Seoul (2009), the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (2009), Mercer Union in Toronto and the Berlinale in Berlin (2010). Christian Giroux lives in Guelph and Daniel Young is based in Toronto. The Young & Giroux duo is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.