Ian Carr-Harris - Work

Work

Primarily a sculptor and installation artist, Ian Carr-Harris' work investigates knowledge and ordering systems, often working with books and libraries, reflecting his early training and career as a librarian. In particular, his work reflects an interest in the intersections between memory and technology, often outmoded technology, which was a recurrent motif of Canadian art in the 1970s. Art historian Mark Cheetham describe's Carr-Harris' 1972 installation Nancy Higginson, 1949- as a key example of work at that time which posits viewers "as forgetful machines who must have memories sense of as existing over time constantly restored." In Nancy Higginson, 1949- Carr-Harris

"defines" this woman through a primitive memory system, the card catalogue, a textual archive in which the photo of Higginson seems out of place, dominated as it (and so much of our lives) is by language.

In his work Carr-Harris often uses common materials and objects, such as tables and cabinets, which are "domestic in scale, almost banal in appearance, initially present their information through texts." Typical of his work in the 1970s and 1980s is a matter-of-fact revealing of the basic elements of the work to the viewer. Where the earlier works show the elements of the entire piece as banal, with text as the only key to the overall work, by the 1990s his work begins to use light projections and the 1994 installation 137 Tecumseth is one of several which artificially "re-enact the passage of sunlight through time across a particular space."