"A Piece of the Pie" Edward Lin and Kira Varvanina

The weekend of the 21^st to the 24^th of January marked the launch of the Toronto International Design Festival. During the festival contemporary local and international design gets a spotlight in various venues around Toronto in the form of exhibitions, lectures and symposiums; an exciting cultural-platter for the community.

As part of the TIDF, The Gladstone Hotel on Queen Street West, played host to a widely announced show with a seducing title: “Come Up to My Room”. Here the curators present an array of heterogeneous designs.

The assorted creations, situated on the second floor of the hotel, matched up the audience made up of children, youngsters, adults, designers, artists, architectures, creative makers, and tourists with an assortment of sounds, smells, textures, colours, forms and ideas coming from each of the artworks as well as the space that they occupied. For me the interactive elements were similar to riding the subway during rush hour. There was little room to move around and a high level of awareness of that space, as well as sounds, smells, and even visual signage.

In terms of conceptual approaches, the methods varied. Some rooms were kept as ‘bedrooms’, while the vast majority of the pieces made used the spaces in rather innovative ways adopting materials rarely found in a hotel room. For the most part these materials composed rather immersive environments where, as I have already mentioned, the components of the artworks triggered an alteration of the viewers’ senses.

And although some pieces, such as the “Archival Library of Found Treasures” by Maggie Greyson, Christine Lieu and Phoebe Lo, and site intervention “Bed Memory” by Richard Unterthiner were literarily presented with instructions as to how to interact with their playful content, the rest of the exhibition did not shy away from allowing the audience to experiment and explore. A pair of slanted, large scale, lucid blocks made up of hundred tennis balls stuck together, designed by Jennifer Davis and Jamie Phelan in a work titled “Ballroom” made the faces of the viewers glow with fluorescence. You could see it in the viewers’ faces, as their minds seemed to wonder trying to solve the lack of equilibrium caused by the semi-diagonal design of each of the blocks.

"Ballroom" Jennifer Davis and Jamie Phelan

The mesmerizing tableau created by Julia Hepburn not only turned viewers, like myself, into voyeurs, but also instigated us to make sense of the extraordinary scene which included the sound of grasshoppers embellishing the serene atmosphere of the room.  Under a very dim light, Hepburn sought to portray what seemed to be the dreams of a crow, which was lying in a single bed while covered in white blankets. The glowing objects floating above the bed told something as to what the dreams might be of, but since there was not textual narrative the viewer was left to make his own dream.

"Can You Remember My Dream?" Julia Hepburn. Mixed media.

The Curatorial statement for the show invited different artists designers stemming from different backgrounds to be extremely subjective in their approach to creating works for this show. From my own perspective, the creative makers involved in the exhibition met the expectations of both the organizers and public. “Come Up to My Room” is not only successful at drawing in a large audience, but also in connecting creative makers practitioners with the rest of the community.

When I first heard of the TIDF, and associated projects, I thought it was a bit of a  joke,  but it has turned out to be a real success in generating public awareness and interesting projects. As Margaret Lindsay puts it in her blog “2009 Critics Picks”: “In these days of deficit, the well of creation still overflows. That is certain and worthy of celebration.”