Susan Hobbs

Ian Carr-Harris’ exhibition presents new works from two ongoing series of sculptures that investigate those primary infrastructures of humanity—such as architecture and language—as materials that are fixed yet plastic.
In merging the architectural model and the peep show together, the works from his Paradigm series position the viewer as surveyor and voyeur. ‘Gebäude’ [shape], his most recent work from this series, reiterates this complex implication and indicates another doubled reference. On the one hand, the work recalls the familiar child’s delight in model architecture as a site for building games, and on the other hand, it alludes to Borges’ short story The Garden of Forking Paths and Orson Welles’ film noir The Third Man.
From his second series titled glimpse, Raven points to the delightful tradition of the movable or pop-up book in its presentation of an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Carr-Harris’ invocation of The Mad Hatter’s notorious riddle invites a sense of playfulness located as much in language as in the mechanisms of the pop-up book itself.