Over the next two weeks keep a watchful eye here on the Come Up To My Room blog as we release photography daily from the show. Below are shots of Room 205 by [R]ED[U]X LAB.
Nestled within the framework of the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson, the contributors and talents that compose [R]ED[U]X LAB fluctuate within its capacity to create an ever-evolving extrospective engine.
Rooted in a culture of design inquiry and innovation, [R]ED[U]X LAB’s transient contributors are nevertheless bound by the task of pursuing the intersection between defining a contemporary design standard and the use of visionary technologies and media to inform this process and its product.
[R]ED[U]X LAB’s current pursuits include a room installation for Come Up To My Room 2012, a mobile device application that exposes layers of textual and graphical information about Toronto landmarks using augmented reality, and a yearly repertoire investigating rapid prototyping technologies in the realm of industrial design. ryearchdesignlab.blogspot.com
University of Toronto Architecture students Matthew Blunderfield and Skanda Lin talk about their installation Firmament, displayed at CUTMR. Firmament comments on the technological obsolescence and disposable nature of the virtual world in which we live. It reflects on the hard costs of an increasingly digital culture.
The installation is sponsored, in part, by Ontario Electronic Stewardship (OES). OES addresses Ontario’s e-waste challenge by overseeing the responsible reuse and recycling of end-of-life electronics through a network of drop-off site across the province. To find out more, visit: recycleyourelectronics.ca
The Love Design Party is the free, all night party where we celebrate our love of design. Come Up To My Room and the Gladstone Hotel host all the alternative, indie designers from the city and their enthusiasts at this no-nonsense dance-a-thon.
2012 Love Design Party – Sat, Jan 28, 2012 – Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West
Featuring the Mix Mastery of DJ’s Joe Blow and Denise Benson.
Toronto Design Offsite (TO DO) is an indie design festival with events and exhibitions that happen during Toronto design week: January 23-29, 2012. Check out the over 20 exhibition and installation based events here.
If you missed the unofficial launch of this year’s TO DO festival brochure (with handy map and event listings), be sure to keep your eyes out for it all of the participating sites.
Now in its second year, this fellow TO DO-er, is an annual exhibit of new work by female, Canadian designers, curated by Katherine Morley, Erin McCutcheon and Ange-line Tetrault. It will be presented in January 2012, at the Bev Hisey Studio (1066 Dundas St. W., at Shaw). The exhibition will feature a wide range of media (ceramic, textile, furniture, product design, illustration and more) that will examine and express the word “capacity” as it relates to the role of women in the field of design.
“CAPACITY” was conceived of in 2010, while Katherine Morley and Erin McCutcheon were discussing an upcoming local design event, and looking at the names of the designers who’d been invited to participate. Not only were there no women designers on the roster, the organizers were not even aware of their omission, when it was brought to their attention. Not long afterward, they launched an informal poll asking people to name any women designers they could. To their shock and dismay, many couldn’t list any at all, and only a few managed to repeat one or two names. At that moment, Morley and McCutcheon knew it was imperative to do something to raise the profile of Canadian women designers, and that they were the ones to do it.
The inaugural “CAPACITY” exhibit garnered much critical praise and press coverage, and attracted a large number of attendees both within and outside of the design community. The curatorial team was extremely honoured to be invited to re-exhibit “CAPACITY” at the Design Exchange in August 2011; as well, McCutcheon was invited to exhibit her individual “CAPACITY” project at the RH Gallery in New York, alongside other contemporary ceramic artists, including Jeff Koons.
The success of “CAPACITY” 2011 reinforced the importance of giving a voice to Canadian women in design, and the Curators have vowed to make it an annual event. In its second year, Morley and McCutcheon are excited to announce the addition of Ange-line Tetrault as Assistant Curator.
Image of Free City Paper project, provided by JP King
Saturday, January 28 – 11am to 1pm – Gladstone Ballroom
Since 2009, CUTMR has hosted a series of talks by artists and designers. Our first talk, The Origin of the Designer!, featured talks by participating artists and designers Andra Hayward, Andrew MacDonald, Jeremy Hatch, Studio Junction and Derrick Hodgson, as they tried to answer big questions about bringing themselves into designer “existence” and surviving in the field. In 2010, Thrive Design for 100%! explored how to bring design to 100% of the community, so that everyone can have access to good design. Last year, CUTMR Design Talks asked the organizer’s of Toronto Design Offsite (TO DO) shows: What to do? Representatives from MADE at HOME, Capacity, Tools and CUTMR reflect on this question, anticipating what’s next in Toronto design, design communities, exhibition making, collaboration, and more.
The theme of this year’s design talks, Let’s Talk, is DISPOSABILITY. Taken in its broadest, strictest, object-oriented or ephemeral sense, these talks explore disposable, ubiquitous objects and the reactionary repurposing of such objects, while also investigating abstracted notions of disposability.
Speakers:
Kerri Flannigan - The After Party: Coming of Age Stories
WE-3 - Hoarding Unpacked
LeuWebb Projects - Film, Vinyl and Paper – Books Unbound
Wendy W Fok - CRAFT // Resilient Production
Sean Martindale - Politics, Challenges and Opportunities
Jp King - Free City Paper: If You Want To Be Rich Tomorrow Buy A Landfill Today
For better or worse, details affect every moment of the design process from idea to creation, to using and appreciating an object. Julie Nicholson and Shaun Moore of MADE continue to introduce new Canadian designs through their evolving Radiant Dark series with the 2012 theme — the Devil is the Details.
The creative focus and follow through to achieve something of worth does not always come easily and therein, the devil lies … Through the Devil is the Details, a variety of independent designer’s approaches to making are highlighted along with their individual responses. The challenges in their explorations of process, materials, an introduction, a curious element or concept, as they are resolved, are the very things that set their works apart. The Devil is the Details emphasises a level of craftsmanship displayed through an understanding of materials and their handling, tied to a thoughtful approach in the production of functional objects. Known standards are considered and tweaked towards new directions, enriching the final outcome. The details here affect the way objects are made, understood and consumed.
Don’t miss the opening for this CUTMR sister show, taking place right before the Gladstone’s Love Design Party on Saturday, January 28, from 3 – 7 PM
Health is a focus of contemporary political debate in a moment of historically high anxiety, but are architects, urban designers and landscape architects seeking a new moral and political agenda within these concerns? Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture examines the complexity of today’s interrelated and emerging health problems juxtaposed with a variety of proposed architectural and urban solutions.
Pollen, pollution, toxic materials that make up the built environment, globalized industrial food production, reclaimed manufacturing landscapes, unbalanced population demographics, sedentary and indoor lifestyles, and efforts to fight death are becoming imperfect materials for architecture to explore. Emerging as trends like healthy cities, green buildings, fit cities, global cities, re-use cities, tailored cities, these strategies suggest inspired solutions, but could also address isolated concerns which privilege specific users or conditions. The focus on problems sometimes creates conflicting agendas and disregards the complexity of the urban fabric.
A book accompanying the exhibition and extending this research will be published in Spring 2012 by CCA with Lars Müller. Edited by Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi, it includes essays by Carla Keirns, David Gissen, Hilary Sample, Linda Pollak, Deane Simpson, Margaret Campbell, Sarah Schrank, and Nan Ellin.
This exhibition is at the CCA from October 25, 2011 to April 15, 2012.
The Starving Artists Collective presents: THE ARTISTS' SOUP KITCHEN
FREE HOT LUNCHES FOR ARTISTS
FREE hot lunch for artists
A different menu each week
Mondays from 12-3pm
January 9 – February 13
The Raging Spoon Cafe
761 Queen Street West, Toronto
Wheelchair accessible space
January 9 – February 13, 2012: For six Monday afternoons this winter, artists are invited to a FREE HOT LUNCH at the ARTISTS' SOUP KITCHEN. Each week is hosted by different artists who will bring their creative practices to The ARTISTS' SOUP KITCHEN. Lunches include a Dr. Seuss homage by artist Ulysses Castellanos offering green eggs and ham on January 9 and mystic pizza crust divination readings by Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling on Janaury 16. Documentation from the ARTISTS' SOUP KITCHEN will be used to create a printed catalogue/recipe book that includes recipes, images from participating artists and critical writing about the project. The ARTISTS' SOUP KITCHEN is presented by the Starving Artists Collective: Catherine Clarke, Jess Dobkin and Stephanie Springgay.
SCHEDULE of Host Artists:
Monday, January 9: Ulysses Castellanos
Monday, January 16: Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling
Monday, January 23: Tobaron Waxman
Monday, January 30: Natalyn Tremblay
Monday, February 6: Annie Cheung
Monday, February 13: Swintak
ABOUT The Artists' Soup Kitchen:
The Starving Artists Collective Artists' Soup Kitchen brings together gastronomical services, social need, and creative/artistic investigation into performance, art, and food. While acknowledging the extensive history of artist restaurants, the sensory experience of performance and food, and the collective experience of community kitchens, the Artists' Soup Kitchen examines the space between art and labor and addresses the myth of "the starving artist".
The project will take place on six Mondays during January and February 2012 at the Raging Spoon Café in Toronto. Artists have been invited to create work for the café environment, bringing their performance and/or social art practice to the space and merging it with the idea of cooking and feeding other community members/artists who will come to the café to eat, talk, and share. In the winter months when many artists are creating work in isolation and paid work is slow, the Artists' Soup Kitchen will provide a space for community, for people to see each other, and come together over a hot meal.
The project explores through cooking, food, and performance the concept of nourishment, both physical and relational. It is important that the kitchen become a performance-based art practice but likewise it is a space to feed each other, to nourish and offer support both bodily and professionally. The goal of the project is to use cooking, an artful, everyday experience, to empower the lives of people in urban environments and to deliver physical and mental health to communities. Through discussion, social bonding, and working in groups, participants are brought out of isolated routines and interact in new ways to activate their minds and bodies. The Artists' Soup Kitchen celebrates a highly social, lateral learning structure in which participants share their cooking skills and feed each other.
Made possible with support from the Toronto Arts Council and Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.
Virtual Exhibition Empowers Viewers through Virtual Critique
Toronto, Ontario – 01/04/2012
This Winter, an unusual and extremely interactive exhibition promises to breath new life into the inundated space of the World Wide Web. Opening on February 1st, CrossTalk: Speech Acts and Interference in Networked Art is an experimental exhibition format that combines a virtual gallery with a real-time virtual critique. Featuring works of net art (art made on and disseminated through the Net) by Evan Roth, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo and Dina Kelberman, visitors to the site will be able to view each artist’s piece and at the same time participate in a live online discussion about their work via message board. The idea behind this unconventional model is to offer a way for the public to become part of the exhibition process through conversation, and also to provide a way for visitors from many different locations and backgrounds to connect and exchange ideas using art as the centrepiece.
Over the course of three days, February 1st through the 3rd, the public is invited to log on at www.crosstalkexhibition.com, view the artworks, register on the message board and participate in an open, unmoderated critique. Registering on the message board for the critique is free, easy and similar to interfaces that the majority of users will already be familiar with. To get the discussion going, an international group of six curators and critics, including former Institute of Contemporary Arts Head of Talks Helena Reckitt and Art Gallery of Ontario contemporary Canadian art curator Michelle Jacques have been invited to post their commentary on the artworks first. After their initial posts, those six curators and critics will stay active in the critique, but as equals to any other participant.
Every person who registers on the board will receive editing privileges, and have the same amount of control as any other person. This is an intentional move by the curator to hand the reigns over to the audience for a change, and to create the conditions for a true democracy amongst visitors. Just like a piece of software, the CrossTalk exhibition model sets up conditions and variables and lets its users determine the final product or outcome.
Lastly, CrossTalk is unique in the way its featured artworks are made. Each of the selected pieces use publicly available content from multiple other users on the Internet to generate how their respective looks. Dina Kelberman’s piece I’m Google uses Google’s Image Search as a continuously changing and evolving image-bank for constructing a visual poem. Evan Roth’s work Banners and Skyscrapers, culls over six hundred images from banner advertisements and collages them together to form a moving fabric of consumerist imagery. And, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo’s piece Tricolor v.2007 rakes Colombian online new sources, building the national flag in text that is laden with nationalist tone and flavour. In these different but related approaches, each work symbolizes a kind of interference in the large flow of culture and communication that the Internet represents. By collecting and reassembling the content of others to create new meanings, Kelberman Roth and Jaramillo turn the usership of the Net into a material itself.
More about the Artists:
Evan Roth (1978) is an established digital media artist and part-time professor at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. His body of work is diverse and often politicized, dealing with issues of authorship, appropriation and public space through a wide range of interrelated media and disciplines, from graffiti and illustrative typography to open source technology and net art. Evan received his bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Maryland and his MFA from the Communication, Design and Technology school at Parsons The New School for Design. After graduating Evan worked at the esteemed Eyebeam OpenLab as Research and Development Fellow from 2005–2006 and a Senior Fellow from 2006-2007. He was also a 2005 recipient of the grand prize Prix Nora Krea at the Norapolis International Multimedia Festival. Evan permanently resides in Paris with his wife.
Dina Kelberman (1979) is an American multimedia artist, web designer and playwright who is best known for her comic strips and illustrations serialized in the Baltimore City Paper, on the humour blog Mutant Funnies and on tinymixtapes.com. Kelberman’s comics are minimal but dynamic, and her characters strangely relatable and yet poignantly misanthropic. This duetting of disparate traits carries over into her net-based artwork where Dina curates the found photography and video of others to create a mapping of her own online-experiences. Dina earned her BFA in 2003 at Purchase College, State University of New York. She continues to live and work in Baltimore, Maryland.
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (1974) is a Brooklyn-based Colombian digital artist, technologist and educator. Her work concentrates on reconfigurations and representations of time and space through media, and has been internationally exhibited and performed, including at Giacobetti Paul Gallery, HERE Arts (NYC), UCLA Hammer Museum (LA) and the Museums of Modern Art in Bogotá and Medellín (Colombia). Cynthia has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from New York University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design and an active member of Madarts, an arts collective in Brooklyn, NY.
CrossTalk: Speech Acts and Interference in Networked Art is curated, designed and programmed by Zach Pearl. It is the culmination of his thesis work for the anticipated receipt of a Masters of Fine Art in Criticism & Curatorial Practice this Spring from OCAD University. Zach has formal, interdisciplinary training in variety of fine art, performing art and design practices. He came into curating serendipitously through museum education and private gallery positions that served as the bread n’ butter of his early twenties. Currently, Zach’s curatorial focus is on the intersection between new media, relational aesthetics and community art practices. Accordingly, Zach has worked independently to curate a variety of projects that integrate aspects of each area for a range of venues, including the Gladstone Hotel, the Textile Museum of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Zach currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.
The DX is proud to announce the Canadian premiere of Unfinished Spaces with introduction by Co-director Benjamin Murray.
January 19, 2012 – 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm
ABOUT
“Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world.” —Fidel Castro (1961)
Cuba’s ambitious National Art Schools project, designed by three young artists in the wake of Castro’s Revolution, is neglected, nearly forgotten, then ultimately rediscovered as a visionary architectural masterpiece.
In 1961, three young, visionary architects were commissioned by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to create Cuba’s National Art Schools on the grounds of a former golf course in Havana, Cuba. Construction of their radical designs began immediately and the school’s first classes soon followed. Dancers, musicians and artists from all over the country reveled in the beauty of the schools, but as the dream of the Revolution quickly became a reality, construction was abruptly halted and the architects and their designs were deemed irrelevant in the prevailing political climate. Forty years later the schools are in use, but remain unfinished and decaying. Castro has invited the exiled architects back to finish their unrealized dream.
Unfinished Spaces features intimate footage of Fidel Castro, showing his devotion to creating a worldwide showcase for art, and it also documents the struggle and passion of three revolutionary artists.
A pre-party for the Toronto design week, PechaKucha Night Toronto is teaming up with Toronto Design Offsite to present you this special TO DO PechaKucha Night Toronto on January 17, 2012 at The Garrison. Tickets are $5 and will only be available at the door. Doors open at 7:30 PM, and presentations start at 8:20 PM. First come first seated!
Each year since 2008, CUTMR curators travel to the University of Waterloo School of Architecture to select 3-5 chairs from the school’s innovative Chair Project, a course led by Professor Elizabeth English. Combining design and structural analysis, an idea (spurred by the students’ selection of a luminary to guide their project) and its physical manifestation, each of these transformable chairs are hand-made by third year architecture students working collaboratively with a classmate.
We are pleased to announce the chairs that will be in this year’s show:
A chair for Robert Service by Fraser Plaxton & Kunaal Mohan
A chair for Jackson Pollock by Piper Bernbaum & Meaghan Murray
A chair for Leon Trotsky by Gwendolyn Lovsted & Benjamin van Nostrand
A chair for Zimoun Jaewoo Chon & Antariksh Tandon
CUTMR 2012 - Saturday, January 28, 2012 – 11:00am to 1:00pm
Taken in its broadest, strictest, object-oriented or ephemeral sense, these talks explore disposable, ubiquitous objects and the reactionary repurposing of such objects, while also investigating abstracted notions of disposability.
The After Party: Coming of Age Stories
Kerri Flannigan
The After Party: Coming of Age Stories is a performative slideshow-lecture that functions as an experimental documentary, visual archive, narration and artist talk. With humour and candour, The After Party will showcase the impermanence of adolescent rites of passage and present a collection of individual anecdotes of coming of age, identity-forming epiphanies. Kerri Flannigan is a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist, originally from Deep River, Ontario. Flannigans work uses unconventional narrative forms to examine themes of memory, monuments, history and identity. In 2011, her zine collaboration Nailbiter 2 won ‘Best English Zine’ at the Expozine Awards.
Hoarding Unpacked
WE-3
There seems to be a strong inclination toward collection and repurposing, even as our objects and appliances become increasingly disposable. This talk will examine, through projects and examples, these contrasting tendencies to trash and to accumulate, and the difficult problem of a designer/cultural producer’s role and responsibility in this mounting kingdom of stuff. WE-3 is a collective of architects, graphic designers and designers (well, one of each) united for CUTMR 2012. WE-3 is interested in creating experiences that are layered in meaning, specifically/spatially located and impeccably executed. WE-3 is Dominique Cheng, Kristina Ljubanovic and Lauren Wickware.
Film, Vinyl and Paper – Books Unbound
LeuWebb Projects
At a time when information is more readily accessible than ever, does it matter whether a book is saved or destroyed? In exploring this question, Christine Leu and Alan Webb of LeuWebb Projetcs, will discuss their installation from the 2011 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche titled ‘Film, Vinyl, Paper’. LeuWebb Projects were Come Up To My Room participants in 2010 and continue to explore the perception of spaces, both banal and exceptional. Christine Leu is an intern architect, writer, photographer, and teacher. Alan Webb is a licensed architect, and dj with projects in graphic design, music and an interest in field recordings.
This talk will explore the processes of digital tooling and analogue production. The highlights of the discussion will proceed onto the craft and fabrication processes for the built environment, and the waste that is generated by the product of the built industry. Dynamic infographics will be developed to illustrate various facts and figures, yet, the larger discussion will be on how the built industry (Architecture and Construction) treats “disposability”. Wendy W Fok, director/founder and team member of WE-DESIGNS.ORG, LLC (Architecture) and studio-WF (Art), winner of the Hong Kong Young Design Talent Award (2009), and a selected designer of the Perspective 40 under 40 Award (2011), has a Master of Architecture & Certification of Urban Policy/Planning from Princeton University. Notably, WE-DESIGNS.ORG, LLC has been selected by Twenty+Change (co-curated by Heather Dubbeldam and Lola Sheppard) as one of twenty “Emerging Canadian Design Practices” (2011) in Canada.
This talk explores the critical role of post-consumer materials in Martindale’s sculptural interventions and discusses how similar approaches can apply to other practices. Sean Martindale (BDes, MFA) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer currently residing in Toronto, Canada. His interventions activate public and semi-public spaces to encourage engagement, often focused on ecological and social issues. His playful works question and suggest alternate possibilities for existing spaces, infrastructures and materials found in the urban environment.
Free City Paper: If You Want To Be Rich Tomorrow Buy A Landfill Today
Jp King
Jp King considers the future of the objects we make, use, love, and destroy, by presenting the findings of his Free Paper Project; which ran as a pop-up newspaper office in Whippersnapper Gallery this past summer, and invited responses surrounding waste, labour, and art. King concludes with his argument that we must come to understand our waste as a resource. Jp King is an artist, writer & publisher whose works explore contemporary mythology, masculinity, garbage, and collective activity. His collages have been exhibited throughout Canada, Brooklyn, Minnesota, and Stockholm. He runs a Risograph printing operation called Paper Pusher that focuses on affordable, limited-edition, innovative publications.
It’s Friday and I don’t feel like inundating our readers with another “What we’re reading” post, although I really enjoyed reading that Matta-Clark book and felt its relevance to the work being done at CUTMR (click here and here for reference). Instead, I will leave you with a little chuckle by re-posting from Jody Brown’s site: Coffee with an Architect.
“Minimalism will not require removal of all of your possessions: They will simply be made to feel inadequate and trite and eventually they will move on.
Minimalism will not be cold and aloof: However, It may be aloof, and then cold.
Minimalism will not match the furniture you currently own: No, in fact the presence of your furniture may make Minimalism feel uncomfortable. Your furniture should leave Minimalism alone.
Minimalism will simplify your life: No, but it will make most of your life harder to access by placing it in multiple boxes carefully labeled and stacked in an unseen corner of the attic.
Minimalism will not like your dogs, nor will they like Minimalism: Cats will be fine.
Minimalism will begin as a striking burst of clarity: This will pass, eventually, you may notice a dull humming drone. This will not pass.
Minimalism is white: No, make that Arctic white or maybe Nordic Blanc.
Minimalism will require you to dress better: Seriously, look at yourself.
Minimalism will not be understood by your Mother: But, this may come in handy.
Minimalism will not cause divorce: unless your partner is just wrong.
Minimalism will not make spaces seem larger: Spaces will seem more expansive. That’s not the same thing.
Minimalism will not cost a lot of money: It will enable you to free yourself of most our your monetary responsibilities.
Minimalism will allow you to shower in private: No, that’s not going to happen. There will be a lot of glass, and multiple windows to the outside, and you will be on axis with something. So, just take your shower quickly and get out of there.
Minimalism will be appreciated by your neighbors. No, your neighbors will think you’re an ass who likes to shower in the open.
Minimalism will like your kids: Not really, they’re sticky. Keep them away from the chaise lounge.
Minimalism will cause OCD: No, but it may provide a fertile environment in which it can prosper.
Minimalism will somehow make your life more, I don’t know… centered? No, it won’t and it doesn’t sound like you deserve Minimalism. You might consider Arts and Crafts.
Minimalism will be simple: Yes, like gravity.
Minimalism will require the complete abandonment of all your individual personality, all that separates you from the pack, and defines who you are: Yes, but it will be better this way
Minimalism wants to kill you in your sleep: …., Maybe”
Metropolis Living is a collective of Industrial Design artists working with new and vintage materials to produce unique and memorable lighting, furnishings and art. The collective includes Phil Freire of Metropolis-Living, (www.metropolis-living.com) Marco Pecota of Veni Vidi Vici Design Inc, (www.vvvdesigninc.com) and Michael M Murphy of The Rust Lab, (www.therustlab.com).
A 5000 square foot studio/showroom located in Toronto’s Swansea neighbourhood, Metropolis Factory serves to showcase the works of these three Artists and their shared passion for the enduring appeal of Industrial Design. From internationally sourced, hand polished vintage selections, to commissioned pieces and collaborative custom projects, if it’s in need of industrial flair it can be found or created at The Metropolis Factory.
Skanda Lin was born in Guangdong, China and studied architecture at the University of Waterloo. She is now completing her Masters of Architecture at the University of Toronto. Matthew Blunderfield was born in Vancouver and studied English Literature at the University of British Columbia. He is now completing his Masters of Architecture at the University of Toronto. All images above are part of a 2010 project titled Colour Studies.
How Do You Make A Cenotaph For Alan Turing? from a larger 2011 project titled Cenotaph for Alan Turing
“Conical Intersect is a multivalent work — part sculptural installation, part street theatre, part rectified readymade, part son et lumière — that nevertheless directly addressed timely issues in the urban landscape. As much as the work turned on a spatial intervention, it was its temporal dimension that in the end defined it. Begun in the last week of September 1975, in the mouldering, detritus-filled rooms of a derelict building slated for demolition, the piece was created in labour-intensive daily increments over a two-week span and remained on view until the second week of October, when another small team of workers appeared on the scene to initiate a different mode of deconstruction. Attaching the links of a metal chain around the rear staircase of the building, they worked in consort with a large crane that alternated between smashing sections of the outer walls and pulling apart chunks of bricks and beams. In a matter of hours, the building was reduced to a pile of debris.”
Excerpt from Bruce Jenkins, Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect, (London: Afterall Books, 2011) 41.
Photo by Deborah Wang, the reader.
Sonia Tyagi draws her inspiration from textiles. In the triptych below, she describes how, at left, the textiles look before pattern cutting begins. At centre, the assembled fabric set aside for a specific work assumes the quality of a single unit, while at right, as she relates it, the colour story begins to unfold.
Sonia’s entry in CUTMR 2012 will be fabric-inspired, but for more details, you’ll have to wait until January.
John Mestito and Roland Ulfig bring a bold graphic and architectural approach to their public installations, and CUTMR 2012 promises to be no exception.
Below, Roland Ulfig’s Meccano-set inspired “Some Assembly Required,” renders an illustration of a 3D object on a flat surface. It was displayed in the Stantec Window Gallery last summer.
John Mestito’s Audrey Lamp was displayed at the Toronto Interior Design Show a few years ago. The fashion-inspired light fixture is formed of fibreglass and resin.
For the 6ème Manifestation Internationale Vidéo et Art Électronique, Ulfig worked with Tom Balaban to produce Mirage, a video installation of multi-layered linear distortion evoking waves of heat that seem to ripple the surface of a hot desert floor.
“The Paris Biennale [1975] provided [Gordon] Matta-Clark with an opportunity to work with the conical figure of projected light — the material in which [artist Anthony] McCall had rendered what he called his ‘solid light film’ performances. It is perhaps precisely this spatialised manifestation of light that was the inspiration for Matta-Clark’s vision of a ‘sound and light show’. Gerry Hovagimyan, one of the artist’s two assistant in the dusty enterprise on the rue Beaubourg, recalled that ‘Gordon and I talked about [Line Describing a Cone] a lot, and that’s what he was trying to do at Beaubourg. In fact, that was the first total Gestalt image he used in a building. [...] Before Conical Intersect he used to chop everything apart.’ This paracinematic aspect of Conical Intersect conjoined, for the first time, Matta-Clark’s filmic ambitions with what he called his ‘anarchitectural’ practice of ‘making space without building it.’”
Excerpt from Bruce Jenkins, Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect, (London: Afterall Books, 2011) 39.
Photo by Deborah Wang, the reader.
vÆry Studio is Richard Philip D’Alessandro and Sonja Storey-Fleming, a duo with work spanning video, architectural concepts, and installations.
Below, a video still reflecting an ongoing examination of how natural forces can be used to challenge perceived boundaries and scale in architectural space. In this case, tide defines space by its dynamism and scalar variation, with subtle and immense forces made visible by their interaction with the form.
The contemporary form of this proposed transit terminal serves as a counterpoint to its urban setting — not imitating or blending in, but complementing the historic character of existing downtown Galt. This delightful tension between new and old, between sparkling and sombre, is poised to renew public interest in what is already a major downtown focal point.
‘Lantern Field’ is a pavilion and public light installation in the Humber River Reserve that creates a public space and destination, attracting distant spectators and engaging close visitors. A playful array of light encourages an interaction in an ethereal environment, promoting creative, thrilling, and unexpected encounters between people and place.
Within the framework of the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson, RAD|LAB’s contributors and talents fluctuate, within its capacity to create an ever-evolving extrospective engine. Rooted in a culture of design inquiry and innovation, RAD|LAB’s contributors, though transient, explore contemporary design using visionary technologies and media. The LAB’s students employ tools ranging from advanced parametric software and microprocessors to a robust array of rapid prototyping technologies to bring their ideas to reality. The body is monitored and facilitated by Assistant Professor Vincent Hui, a full time faculty member within the Department.
Oxalis, an acoustically driven interactive membrane, is animated through an LED array:
Arthropod, below at left, is a lighting proposal investigating the illumination properties of wood:
The kinetic installation Bête Noir responds to light and motion:
Check out the video of Come Up To My Room 2011 by Matthew Nayman, Sean Manton and Pouyan Fard.
Come Up To My Room (CUTMR) is the Gladstone Hotel’s annual alternative design event. CUTMR invites artists and designers to show us what goes on inside their heads. Coming together in dialogue and collaboration, participants are limited only by their imaginations, making CUTMR one of the most exciting shows in Toronto. The four-day event is in its ninth year at the Gladstone Hotel, featuring 11 room installations and 13 public space projects
PechaKucha is an event where designers and design enthusiasts sharing inspiring work through slide presentations of 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. Its high octane super casual and fun stuff!
PechaKucha Night in Toronto Vol. 11 will take place November 3 at The Garrison, an indie music venue and bar — organizer Vivien Leung has even compared to our PKN Tokyo venue of SuperDeluxe. Three words, “Design + Think + Passion,” are the theme for the night. The full list of presenters can be found on the official event page. The poster was designed by Trevor Embury.
uA is an multi-disciplinary collective founded in 2010 by James Brazil, César Daoud and Nicholas Waissbluth in Barcelona, Spain. The group is structured as a “cloud network” engaging ‘u’nsolicitated ‘A’ction projects in architecture and urbanism. Through ongoing workshops, public events, performances and exhibitions by uA members in 3 different continents, the decentralized studio aims to merge its diverse cultural knowledge with ongoing new technologies, creating new models of participatory design and fabrication.
(Above) At the 2011 EASA conference in Cadiz, Spain, uA hosted a workshop entitled: Urban Body Trans*Plant. Investigating how the architect and designer can identify and suggest simple transformations of urban space to improve everyday life, the workshop is a performative look at the psychogeographic reading of the city’s urban spaces.
Temp de Flors. Girona, Spain
Temps de Flors is a flower exhibition which takes place each year within the streets, alleys, courtyards, gardens and monuments of old-town Girona. ”A wooden crate drops from the sky. A gift spills out onto the cobblestones. The city converses with this dynamic motion of the flow; lowering its resolution as it takes the form of the staircase, suspending it in time.”
Mold_One. Canada
Mold_one is a material + design exploration into multi-use furniture. The double sided “bench” can be flipped on either side to be a single or multi-person seat. Materials: Wood, Fiberglass, Gelcoat finish
Wendy W Fok (Artist/Architectural Designer/Urbanist) director/founder and designer for WE-DESIGNS.ORG, LLC (Architecture) and studio-WF (Art), winner of the Hong Kong Young Design Talent Award (2009) and a selected designer of the Perspective 40 under 40 Award (2011) has a Master of Architecture & Certification of Urban Policy/Planning from Princeton University. Notably, WE-DESIGNS.ORG, LLC has been selected by Twenty+Change (co-curated by Heather Dubbeldam and Lola Sheppard) as one of twenty Emerging Canadian Design Practices (2011) in Canada.
Bartlett-Kinetic Research
Fok has an international background from Vienna, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong and Canada. While having worked on several international architectural projects, exhibitions, and competitions, her art installations have also been displayed in Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, Athens, Venice (12th Biennale di Venezia – Architecture), and Prague. Upcoming installations include presentations at the Aalto Academy in Finland, Pecha Kucha Toronto, and more.
Material research
Fok’s interests are towards investigations of contextual and content-related natures of fabrication, and cradle-to-cradle material investigations that compliment scaled prototypes within architectural design. Meanwhile, her design methodology is to challenge the dynamic significance in structuring and mapping the ideals of art, architecture, and urbanism within the processes of [design | optimisation | fabrication] for sustainable planning, interactive design, material research, and alternative methods of fabrication with progressive aims within the built environment.
Workshop Matsys
Currently, Fok is an Assistant Professor and Lead of the Digital Media and Design Program at the Gerald D Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Architecture teaching Material/Fabrication Graduate Studios. Fok is also the founder and administrator of (C)ODE-(C)OLLECTIVE: GH + Digital Script + Code Collective—a collective forum for Grasshopper, Rhino, Parametric Modeling, and other digital design tools, which pose as an educational and developing archive site to formulate the critical utility of digital tools. She is also Contributing / Overseas Editor for the a+a magazine, published by the Architectural Society of China.
Void Engineering is a design co-operative of eight students from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. The co-operative has a diverse background, with strengths ranging from strong conceptual design to comprehensive applied skills. Each member contributes a unique set of abilities and perspectives to the group dynamic. In addition to the team’s independent and academic pursuits, each member has professional experience in architectural design from cities including Toronto, Vancouver, Shanghai, New York, and Cape Town. This combination of abilities in architectural theory and technological exploration has influenced the way Void Engineering perceives space and designs as a group. Through its work, the co-operative aims to explore how human interactions and senses can be heightened through immersive environments that engage the user through more than just visual stimulation. Members of the practice have worked on a wide variety of installations and spatial work, including large-scale recyclable sculptures, small design-build projects as well as numerous architectural designs and visualizations.
One of the most compelling festivals the city has to offer is Digifest! It starts next week so you had better grab your tickets soon.
Digifest is Toronto’s international festival celebrating innovation and digital creativity. From October 26-30, we will be bringing together some of the world’s best and brightest to showcase next generation digital art & design. Established and emerging designers, technologists and artists will come together during Digifest for presentations, incredible demos, interactive exhibitions and parties. Attendees will learn about the latest trends and experience innovations firsthand.
Digifest showcases digital media creativity in Toronto, bringing together academic, industry and the public to experience the convergence of interactive & mobile media, gaming, art and design, architecture, simulation and more. Digifest will celebrate the latest achievements in visualization, simulation and interaction in many fields, inspiring and connecting all involved.
Presented by the Design Exchange, STORYTELLERS: Exhibition Design Lecture Series is aimed at exploring the various elements of exhibition design from conception to presentation. This two-part series will provide an overview of fundamental curatorial practices through the lens of diverse curatorial perspectives.
Speakers
David Liss - Artistic Director & Curator, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Jacqueline Tang - Senior Designer, Lord Cultural Resources
Shirley Madill - Executive Director, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
Curator of Zone B at ScotiaBank, Nuit Blanche, 2011
Pay What You Can
Recommended Donation $10
To confirm attendance please email
Noa at noa@dx.org
The installation investigates the dialectic between architecture as a physical mechanism, and the imaginative potential of architectural works. A field of 28 tripods are arranged in a grid forming a series of planar landscapes. Attached to each is a hand-wound bracket housing a pin, collectively wired in series to a main trigger. Balloons filled with a fine powder hover just above these menacing agents of destruction. When the contraption is engaged a discreet elevation emerges as a ghosted façade.
The result is an architecture which lasts for mere seconds.
water+wind
The project studies the movement of flowing water: steam, a river’s turbulence, and the meeting of wind and water have been captured and translated into three dimensional forms. The works seek to give material expression to the movement of water. Water is, by definition, always changing, either flowing or freezing, evaporating or thawing, and to give expression to this movement required the development of sensitive means of observation, translation, and fabrication.
Aside from the focus on technology, the project required careful attention to technique, materiality, form, and beauty.
Ceiling, Northhouse
The ceiling design for the Joint university submission -University of Waterloo, Simon Fraiser University and Ryerson University- to the 2009 solar decathlon in Washington D.C is derived from out of a process of rapid and iterative prototyping.
Using the outlying constraints of building code requirements, material availability, recessed furniture allowances and fabrication time limitations, as parametric information, the resultant field of over 5000 unique fabric cones provides both sound dampening and light diffusion for the live/work studio space of the 700 SQ.F. North House
For his thesis in architecture, Dominique Cheng transformed the city of Kowloon, Hong Kong into a performative interface that referenced the extraordinary landing approaches into (now defunct) Kai Tak International Airport.
Industrial Myth-Making on the St. Lawrence Seaway
For her thesis in architecture, Kristina Ljubanovic focused on an area of Ontario, east of Cornwall, flooded in 1958 for the St. Lawrence Seaway expansion. Through artifact, architecture, program, film and narrative—and delivered via installation—the work seeks to disseminate the history/story of Ontario’s Lost Villages to a wider public.
Here to There
Half map and half puzzle, this book by Lauren Wickware tells the story of a daily journey, from home to work and back. Using patterns derived from sidewalk cracks and random glimpses of images, the viewer is able to reassemble the path taken by folding the pages into various configurations.
The CUTMR alumni of PDA are holding another Art Fundraiser — a silent auction with proceeds going to the 40 Oaks project.
If you’re not already familiar with Public Displays of Affection: they’re a loosely-structured collective of Torontonians dedicated to community-engaged design. They’ve completed projects like PDA for Edmond Place, which furnished a Parkdale affordable housing complex with pieces either made by residents through workshops or donated by local designers. They’re currently working on something similar, PDA for 40 Oaks, a Regent Park Revitalisation project that will provide furnishings and interior design to the 40 Oaks affordable housing complex.
To help cover the costs of documentation, PDA is holding a fundraiser, something you can be a part of in two ways: if you’re an artist or designer, consider donating a work of art for the fundraiser. Anything, from a small print on up, would be appreciated. Details on how to submit your work are on PDA’s website.
Part 2: stop by the Gladstone Hotel on October 31st between 8pm and midnight to place a bid in the silent auction, and take home an original work of art. There will be DJs, dancing, Hallowe’en reverie, and a chance to bid on what will surely be an outrageous diversity of original art.
Oct 01, 2011 | Categories:Blog, Friends | Comments Off
As a child, Hyungshin’s family moved often. As a result of the new urban planning policy of his native Korea, his family often had to relocate as their home would be torn down to accommodate newer developments. As the walls crumbled back to stone, his childhood memories were left without evidence. Later, he would collect the debris from these buildings, in the hopes of gathering the pieces and like a puzzle reassemble the discarded elements into a recognizable shape. And with this found dust he reclaimed not only evidences of his past memories but also the life cycle of the modern concrete jungle.
In his first travels to Europe he was surprised by the architectural history, having come from a country he felt was addicted to building and re-building, where new was all too quickly replacing the old. It was these interests that led the Hyungshin to explore the disappearing forms within the quickly mutating society in which he lives.
TOMA is a design studio producing playful urban objects that bring a bright spot to everyday life with a wink of humour and a sparkling spirit. Because they have been conceived by graphic designers, these objects mix form and function in a visual syntax that also includes their presentation and packaging.
Bootwear Mats are made in polyethylene and available in a water drops or street grid design. Bootwear mats explore our relationship with the weather in a playful, practical manner.
Trivets are a family of five CNC (computer numerically cut) Russian birch plywood designs and one cork design all providing heat resistance to protect tables/countertops. They may be grouped together to create a table centre.
Inside Out describes a range of products with fluid lines. The collection endows daily rituals with a touch of humour while taking a new look at the objects around us. The line offers practical, aesthetically pleasing objects composed of plain, recyclable materials.
Fugitive Glue is led by Jano Badovinac and Ryan Wilding, a design solutions agency with a diverse team of multidisciplinary talents spanning everything from multimedia to industrial design. In their own words, they “cut, paste, staple, dance, sketch, build, paint, up-hoard, laugh, bike, sew, photograph, write, dumpster dive, push pixels, make videos, quote the Simpsons, laugh some more, and generally have fun doing what they love. FG is creative enough to solve any design problem, and smart enough to win the science fair. It can dress up like it’s picture day and be fun like finger painting, only better.”
You can see more of what they’ve been working on at fugitive-glue.com.
Ad Banner Blind
Vinyl outdoor ad banners are thrown in the trash every day when they could be used to create clever and beautiful products. Layering this perforated vinyl over your window as an alternative to a fabric blind creates a scrambled effect along with layered type that will make any design nerd want one.
Depo Deco DIY
Depo Deco is an ongoing DIY project. Roam a Home Depot store, fill your cart with random parts and then “MacGyver” it into something wild and wonderful. We love the “Eureka” moment when all of the unrelated components fit together perfectly and you realize how versatile, affordable and accessible design can be.
Encygluepedia
Using the old “Gun in the Bible” jail-break trick as our inspiration, we decided to up-cycle the now largely obsolete telephone book into a beautifully bound hardcover. Great for those who’d rather reach for their bookshelf than their toolbox.
Interstice Studio is Victoria Beltrano, Fiona Lim-Tung, and Kristen Lim-Tung.
Fiona and Kristen are returning CUTMRers; in 2010, together with Lisa Keophila and Jonathan Margono, they created a bedroom installation featuring a canopy of paper flowers.
The sisters continued their work with paper for a photographic collaboration based on the concept of a menagerie. Here’s their representation of the lobster:
Kristen also creates solo works in porcelain, like these geodesic vessels, and below, a brooch with a tiny hand-painted airplane:
Joining them in 2012 to complete the trio of Interstice Studio is Victoria Beltrano. Victoria has turned a vacant commercial building into an urban snow globe, a projection-based installation completed as a part of an event call Unsilent Night:
Victoria also collaborated on a series of urban furniture installations, designed specifically for five sites around Sudbury with the intention of tapping the unused potential of the sites. From Public Potentials / Localized Infrastructures, this chess table and chairs invites people to sit and play:
In 2012, Interstice Studio will be exploring new territory, applying their unique approach to creating detail to new materials. Stay tuned!
Wednesday, September 21, 2011, 8-11 PM
Gladstone Hotel, Second Floor Gallery
1214 Queen Street West, Toronto
Celebrate what’s great about design in Toronto at the Meet TO DO: Toronto Design Offsite Warm-Up. The TO DO Steering Committee invites designers and design enthusiasts to come to the Gladstone Hotel for a relaxed, social gathering — like a house warming, but not at our house. Have a drink, chat with the organizers, curators and makers of Toronto Design Week exhibitions and events, meet contemporary artists and designers, and get excited about … design!
Toronto Design Offsite (TO DO) is a comprehensive guide to exhibitions and events happening across the city during Toronto Design Week. Formed by an association of several ‘offsite’ shows, all of our exhibitions and events feature and promote the best in new, Canadian practices – not only the art and design within each show, but also the ways they are organized, curated and produced – as well as contemporary international design.
TO DO is a self-funded, membership-based, collaborative initiative committed to promoting top-notch exhibitions and events during Toronto Design Week. Our web- and print-based advertising, social media, and iPhone App, provides the public and media with up-to-date information about the exhibitions and events listed with TO DO. In this way, TO DO also operates as a resource and guide for accessing great art and design.
Joy Charbonneau (Associates, Tools, Heavy Metal), Shaun Moore and Julie Nicholson (MADE at Home, Radiant Dark), Katherine Morley and Erin McCutcheon (Capacity), Jeremy Vandermeij, and David Dick-Agnew, Noa Bronstein and Deborah Wang (Come Up To My Room) form TO DO’s steering committee.
For more information, please contact:
Shaun Moore or Julie Nicholson, MADE
416 607 6384
info@madedesign.ca
www.todesignoffsite.com
Come Up To My Room, the Gladstone Hotel’s annual alternative design show, is seeking expressions of interest for their design talks on Saturday, January 28, 2012.
The theme of Let’s Talk is DISPOSABILITY. Taken in its broadest, strictest, object-oriented or ephemeral sense, these talks explore disposable, ubiquitous objects and the reactionary repurposing of such objects, while also investigating abstracted notions of disposability.
Potential topics include: design and throw-away culture; private/public memory and the ephemeral; the culture of disposability; dissolution and decay; permanence and materiality; transience; the lifecycles of objects; information and communication technologies (ICTs) and disposability; the impact of disposable lifestyles on the environment and/or economics.
Let’s Talk will take place at the Gladstone Hotel on Saturday, January 28 from 11:00am to 1:00pm. Talks should be 15 minutes in length, accompanied by an optional image-based or Powerpoint presentation. The talks will conclude with a moderated question and answer period addressed to all presenters.
This call is open to the public, and we are looking for a broad range of topics and ideas; surprise us!
Please submit an Abstract or Expression of Interest (200-500 words) and CV to Noa Bronstein, Co-Curator, Come Up To My Room, at noa@comeuptomyroom.com
Application deadline: October 24, 2011
Selection notification: November 10, 2011
My Second Archipelago Fimo, expandable foam, wood, wax, paint, 2010
Drawing conceptual influence from literary sources, these sculptural ‘island’ forms build an imaginary ‘little world’ for the viewer to experience. They retain the so-called child-like qualities of construction, but reflect the intricate situation details of my practice and merge the ‘made’ with found kitsch objects.
Night Roses, 2010
This was a 12-hour performance at the Gladstone Hotel during Nuit Blanche Toronto 2010. Visitors helped fill the room with 300lbs of hand-made roses, which slowly followed the architecture of the room, as they grew from one back corner of the space. This project received exhibition assistance from the Ontario Arts Council. www.nightroses.ca
The molten word, bronze, 2005-2011
A hollow cast in wax of a typewriter was made in 2005. I gave this to my father, who put it on a table in his office, allowing the sun to hit it in the same spot for 5 years. It gradually melted and fell in on itself, forming a ‘happy accident’ that we gradually saw unfolding. It was then cast in bronze, ending the process and creating an impossible and inherently nostalgic object.
Message in a bottle (in progress), cast resin, 2011
This project plays on the idea of a ‘message in a bottle’ as floating away form a deserted island for help and also being a wishful and hopeful. The clear bottles are cast form dolls house/ antique bottles and rest on the floor, unable to move and reach an intended or accidental destination.
Process shot of Set Table with the curly cutlery cut outs and the solid maple top
Sitting pretty in the alley waiting to get delivered; Set Table with solid walnut pedestal base
Project: Katrina Tompkins, Set Table, May 2011
Statement: The client wanted an eating table where his three daughters would always feel welcomed and appreciated.
Birdie bling
Project: Janna Watson, Birdie bling
Statement: This work is complete, but also the beginning of a a new process with spray painting. The thing about paint is you can never hold it until it is a painting, but at that point you can only behold it.
#1 graffiti project
Project: Janna Watson, #1 graffiti project
Statement: Creating heaven for the garbage cans
DarkLab is currently working on an interactive art installation for the upcoming Nuit Blanche.
As visitors enter the installation, their movements are transformed using echolocation technology into a blend of light, video and 3D audio that constantly re-generates, morphs and immerses the participants. Combining computer vision software, generative sound, and graphic theory to create an evolving multi-media composition, “The Sound is Watching You” allows participants to become instruments of light and sound – moving, dancing, and gliding through a space that they have helped to create.
That’s not the only contribution DarkLab’s members are making to Nuit Blanche 2011: Chris and Deane were part of a 20-member team of fabricators, technologists and visionaries that help build and install The Heart Machine, a massive fire-art installation for last year’s Burning Man in the Nevada Desert. Spanning over 60 feet across, the project was a huge success that combined electronics, flame and sculpture to allow a unique level of audience interaction and participation with a piece of this size. The Heart Machine is currently being “upgraded” and will be making another appearance at this year’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.
You can see more of the Burning Man appearance here.
When making music, Deane also goes by Akumu, the name under which he recently released Between Worlds, a video and multi-source DVD/CD, complete with a 60-minute abstract surround-sound score and experimental video series. This work delves into that suspended moment at the end of one’s existence. At times calming and at times unsettling, it explores the languid balance within the fraction of dying and living to produce a score that is peaceful, hypnotic and ever so slightly… unnerving.
You can explore more here, including videos and teasers.
Chris, meanwhile, is a sculptor working in metal and other materials. Some of her recent work incorporates large rocks which are wrapped with metal in a way that expresses the strength and persistence of a living thing when it is allowed to grow gradually and naturally.
What Has Architecture Done for You Lately, 2009 exhibit curated by archiTEXT, at the Design Exchange
archiTEXT community-wide workshop
archiTEXT is a multidisciplinary design consultancy and creativity think tank comprised of a team of eclectic, dynamic, and creative young people – from the world of design, business, research, art and various other places – who use design and creativity as a tools for discourse, impact, and to engage the public. As a design consultancy, archiTEXT engages organizations with creativity – offering creative collaboration on idea cultivation, strategy development and concept execution. As a creativity think tank, archiTEXT is the place to research, play, explore and engage with a variety of creative, traditional, and non-traditional media. archiTEXT is involved in innovation in design thinking, communities and design, and the exploration of putting design and creativity into the hands of those that usually do not engage with it, allowing them to explore and play with design as a change- making tool.
Lost Nation believes in bringing a little bit of nature into the home. Heavily inspired by the forest wood worker Katie Barnstaple creates pieces that reflect her love of the woods and that showcase the incredible beauty of the material: wood. The Lost Nation philosophy is a simple one. Create beauty on a small sustainable level, source materials that are native to this land, and spend as much time in the forest as possible. Katie will be bringing some of her forest-inspired wood pieces to the CUTMR 2012 public spaces.
Gareth Bate, Installation for "Corps Intérieur" (Inner Body), Montreal
The installation for Corps Intérieur (Inner Body) was collaboration with David Pressault, a Montreal choreographer. The experimental contemporary dance was performed at the Monument National theatre in Montreal in Jan 09 and then remounted in Dec. 09. The immersive 200-foot multi-level environment allowed the audience to wander freely in a glowing underworld reminiscent of an ancient cave or pulsing inner body.
Gareth Bate, Plastic Paintings Self-Portrait Installation, High Park, Toronto
This piece came about during a time when Gareth couldn’t think of what to do next. So he just started painting self-portraits on pieces of torn up plastic tarp. Over several weeks they started to accumulate into a full wall work. Later he took them outside and photographed them hanging in trees and stuck in the snow in Toronto’s High Park. For Gareth they are about trying to find a relationship with nature while living in the city.
Gareth Bate, Digital Rendering of the Fleshed Out installation at Gareth Bate Art Projects, 401 Richmond St. West, Toronto
Gareth Bate is planning an installation for Fleshed Out a collaboration with Montreal choreographer David Pressault and Toronto dancer Shannon Litzenberger. At its core, Fleshed Out explores the relationship between technology and the body, and how this relationship is quickly evolving. The installation will be an immersive experience like being inside a giant computer circuit board made entirely of found objects and obsolete computer parts.
Carolyn is currently completing her Masters of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. Her academic work focuses on stimulating the re-growth of Buffalo through its urban artifacts. She has worked in both Toronto and New York, most recently for Toronto’s Paul Raff Studio. Professionally her experience ranges in scale from urban master planning to millwork and furniture design.
Robin currently works as a copywriter at Toronto based advertising agency, MacLaren Momentum. Aside from the web content and radio and television commercials she writes for work, Robin has also produced short stories and other writing projects, as well as visual art projects focusing on the use of collage.
Dining Pavilion; Ontario, Canada
Collage Piece
Together, we developed AreWeDating?, a twitter account with a satirical look at the world of dating and has an ever increasing number of followers.
The participants for the 9th annual show — taking place this January 27 to 29th (mark your calendars now!) — have been selected! Over the coming months, we’ll be introducing (or re-introducing) you to the brave exhibitors you can expect to see.
The distinction of being first belongs to Matthew Davis and Aurelia Adams, both architecture students at the University of Waterloo. Adams has explored her interest in interactive spacial interaction interning with Parkin Architects (Toronto), Aquitectonica (Miami), and del Río Núñez (Santiago). Davis followed his interests in architecture, identity and brand development to internships with KPF (New York), Aquitectonica (Paris), and Coop Himmelb(l)au (Vienna).
In the images below, you can see their poster, It’s Been Fun, made from images collected during their travels; their complete brand identity for FTAN, a solar energy startup; and Distorting the Big Box, a concept for a hybrid form of big box architecture that integrates agriculture and residential space.
….To Understand? To withstand? To produce? To learn? To love? Is your cup half full or is it half empty? How much of who you are is what you collect? Is infinity possible? Ten of Toronto’s top industrial, graphic, textile and product designers– Maiwenn Castellan, Joy Charbonneau, Michelle Ivankovic, Arounna Khounnoraj, Erin McCutcheon, Katherine Morley, Nathalie Nahas, Ayla Newhouse, Ange-line Tetrault, and Kirsten White– grapple with the concept of ‘CAPACITY’ and how it applies to who we are and what we do.
Capacity 2011 premiered during Design Week at bookhou and will be opening at the Design Exchange on August 25, 2011. Come by to meet the designers and curators, Katherine Morley (past CUTMR curator) and Erin McCutcheon at the opening reception on August 26, 2011 from 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm at the DX or at the Capacity talk entitled Design and Gender? on August 29, 2011. The reception and talk is open to the public, all are welcome.
Artist Sean Martindale presents his FEAST 01 grant-winning project at FEAST 02
feast 03 TORONTO
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
FEAST (Funding Engaging Actions with Sustainable Tactics) Toronto is a series of community dinners and micro-funding events. During each dinner, artists, designers and groups are invited to present proposals for art- or design-based projects. Everyone attending the dinner votes on which project they would like to fund, and the project with the most votes is given a grant from the money raised from the ticket sales. The artist or group chosen will be invited back to the next FEAST to present their completed project.
We are looking for proposals for the next FEAST, edition 03, taking place on Sunday, September 25, 2011 at XPACE Cultural Centre, 58 Ossington Avenue, Toronto. This FEAST will happen concurrently with other events as part of The Soup Network.
FEAST 03 proposals should include:
A Project Summary (1), and the answers to the following questions:
(2) How will you use funding to realize your project?
(3) Why is this project critical to the FEAST community (e.g. why would the FEAST community be interested in supporting your project)?
(4) The names and contact information for all of your presenters
Each of the chosen participants presents a 5-7 minute presentation to the gathered guests over dinner, and then everyone gets a chance to vote on which projects they would like to fund. The money raised from the dinner (estimated at $700+, plus a 1 week studio rental or rehearsal space at Toronto Free Gallery) will go to fund the chosen project. We will also have a separate student grant of $300.
Each section of the proposal (1-4) should be no longer than 100 words. Remember these will be short presentations, so keep it brief and to the point! In order to be considered for FEAST funding, you must be able to attend the dinner event. Tickets for this locally-sourced, vegetarian dinner will be $20-30, and $10 for students.
+ Proposals are due by Wednesday, September 7, 2011.
+ Email your complete proposals to info@feast-toronto.com with the subject line: FEAST 03 Submission. Please indicate clearly on your proposal if you are applying for the student grant.
FEAST Toronto was founded by Amber Landgraff and Deborah Wang. This event is co-presented by XPACE Cultural Centre, and sponsored by Toronto Free Gallery. See www.feast-toronto.com for details, photos and sponsors of previous FEAST events. If you would like to support feast with a donation of any amount, please contact us at info@feast-toronto.com.
TUG – Toronto Upcycling Group – is Kaveri Joseph, Christine Lieu, Jessica Ching, Carrie Liang and Heidi Mok. The team of industrial designers, collectors, makers, and self -proclaimed food and drink enthusiasts and ninjas designed a woven lighting structure and tapestry for CUTMR 2011. The structure which adorned the ceiling and walls of the Gladstone Cafe employed a non-linear weaving technique which created an airy mass, as light peaked through overlapping and open spaces.
Jen Spinner is an artist and graphic designer, whose works explore urban environments through paper models and sculpture. For CUTMR 2011, Jen constructed a series of miniature, paper-made fire escapes. By creating a transformative space, ESCAPES III, asked the viewer to consider their relationship with these iron structures.
The Melody Bar got a colour injection from local artist Orest Tataryn, who should be no stranger to fans of Come Up To My Room — his works were featured in 2006 and 2010, as well as in many galleries across the city. For 2011, Tataryn’s signature use of light and colour enlivened the Gladstone’s music venue, and was visible through the window to all passers-by.
Come Up To My Room (CUTMR) is the Gladstone Hotel's annual alternative design event. CUTMR invites artists and designers to show us what goes on inside their heads. Coming together in dialogue and collaboration, participants are limited only by their imaginations, making CUTMR one of the most exciting shows in Toronto. The four-day event is in its ninth year at the Gladstone Hotel, featuring 11 room installations and 13 public space projects.
Sign Up for the CUTMR Call for Submissions & News Mailing List
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How Do You Make A Cenotaph For Alan Turing? from a larger 2011 project titled Cenotaph for Alan Turing
