Montreal Star – Summer 1967

Sculpture symposium at the Youth Pavilion
by Robert Ayre

(Excerpt)

Last phase in David Sorensen's sculpture series "Growth" in the exhibition of the Youth Pavilion.

When I speak of sculpture at the Youth Pavilion in La Ronde I’m not thinking of Richard Lacroix’s Machination – blop! Klonx! Out! Bong! – otherwise described as un evenement musical inoui & social. That’s a happening, occurring twice in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening – tonight, for example, at 8:30, 9:30 and 10:30. While not exactly “unheard of”, it is certainly full of new ideas.

Sculpture at the Youth Pavilion is spread over three areas, the symposium, the free workshop or atelier libre, and the exhibition. There’s plenty of activity over there in the open air in the shadow of the Gyrotron.

I DIDN’t FIND it quite as tumultuous as David Sorensen did. Speaking of his series called “Growth” in the exhibition, he contrasted it with “the crowds of hip youth moving around the pavilion and the tumultuous sculpture symposium roped off beside it”. More experienced than some of the others, he may have felt a little out of his element.

Sorensen studied at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Art School and worked for several years in Mexico where he studied bronze casting on a grant from the Thea Koerner Foundation. He is now teaching in Montreal.

His “Growth” is profoundly sculptural, beginning with the solid egg which in succeeding stages is split open and developed until finally life is freed to spring into the air in the form of a plant which drives upwards and turns back and up again, at once active and at rest in equilibrium, graceful yet strong. The works, originally formed in plaster, were cast in ciment fondu, which has the density of stone and a breathing surface texture that is completely appropriate to the subject. With the help of a grant from the Canada Council, the sculptor was able to have three pieces cast in bronze and this is satisfactory, too, especially for supple works like the last of the series.

Sorensen was not a member of the symposium but the two sculptors exhibiting with him have been working at the pavilion – Gail Kenny of Toronto, who shows the influence of Henry Moore, and Inderjeet Sahdev, originally from India, whose grooved and perforated wood carving recalls Barbara Hepworth. When I was there, he was carving a mountainous form of stone that I felt showed more originality.

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