Robert Therrien

Robert Therrien employs an increase in scale as a means to intensify the experience of one's own body and to bring about an interaction between the viewer, the artwork and the surroundings. The work's pictorial connotations and our physical experience of it consequently go hand in hand. Those who walk around the leaning stack of plates, which looks as though it will topple over at any moment, will have a sense of losing their own balance. The sculpture's spiral shape gives rise to disorientation. Aside from having this physical effect, Therrien's sculpture also has an emotional impact: the work causes the familiar world of our experience to falter and thereby opens up surprising perspectives that invite us to reconsider our relationship to the ordinary.