Paradigms are what we learn in school: models for definition, language, and how to be in the world; apart from things and yet caught within them. In Ian Carr-Harris’ Paradigm series, the merging of the architectural model and the peep show catches our gaze: the first enabling us as surveyor, the second enrolling us in the complicity of the voyeur. The latest sculpture from this series of works, ‘Gebäude’ [shape], plays with this ambiguity through a doubled reference. On one hand, the work gestures towards a child’s familiar delight in the building as a construction site or game to be played, akin to Wittgenstein’s language game. On the other is a more veiled reference to Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths and the 1949 film noir The Third Man, set in a post-war Vienna where nothing is as it seems.

On the second floor, Carr-Harris displays a new work from his glimpse series titled Raven. Recalling the delightful tradition of the movable or pop-up book and its tactile association of object, image, movement and text, the glimpse series pursues the significance it holds for our recognitions of discovery and loss. Like the form of the book itself, it enables us at any moment to step back and forth across the threshold from being present to being absent. Raven opens up Lewis Carroll’s Alice at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, inviting a playfulness situated as much in language as in the invitations of the pop-up book itself.