Victoria, Canada
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
When encountering an artwork for the first time, there’s a natural desire to try to understand it, to ponder the artist’s motivation and the work’s meaning. Daniel Laskarin’s 10-year survey, “Agnostic Objects (things persist),” thwarts this impulse. The sculptures intrigue yet mystify, their meanings open-ended and seemingly just out of reach. They demand close and repeated looking. Laskarin uses a range of hard and soft materials and works with video, sound, and mechanical components, fabricating new forms and combining them with found objects. His sculptures are experimental in nature—or at least they appear to be. We can imagine him trying one material and shape, associating it with another, then rearranging it, adding, subtracting, and so on. The sculptures stand on the verge of becoming something, or suggesting something, hovering around the edges of recognition. As a former engineer and helicopter pilot, Laskarin certainly knows how to build things, yet some of his sculptures appear on the brink of collapse due to the seemingly precarious nature of their construction. …see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
