Daniel Young

Christian Giroux and Daniel Young met in 2000 and have been collaborating since 2002. Often their works, including sculpture, public art and film installations, take the aesthetics, materials and techniques of industrial fabrication and design as their starting point. 

Young and Giroux’s pieces can be described as a contemporary form of Modernist art. With formal nods to minimalist icons such as Tony Smith and Donald Judd and inspired by the classic writings of Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller, their ever evolving lexicon of found forms and materials has led them to produce works composed variously of hollow sheet metal chassis, powder coating, ready-made IKEA furnishings, lighting apparatuses and construction materials. Working from different cities, they often collaborate via email, exchanging and gradually refining 3D models of a sculpture or project until both artists decide it has reached completion. They then elicit a third party fabricator to create the work.

Every Building, or Site, that a Building Permit was Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006, 2008 is a systematic photography project, presented as a film, documenting each site for which a building permit was issued (excluding single family homes) in Toronto in 2006.  No contextual information is offered, each building is presented anonymously.  The artists describe it as an “attempt to view Toronto's new urban totality and investigate construction in the city beyond the much discussed condo boom.”

Young & Giroux won the 2011 Sobey Art Award.  Christian Giroux teaches at the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph, Ontario. Daniel Young is the Canada Council Artist in Residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin for 2011-12.