Artist Statement:

The artists’ installation works transform the perception and experience of places. They intervene with existing spaces aiming to re-contextualize settings and historical meaning. Frequently, political and ethical viewpoints are melded within the beauty of the surface, space or object.

Bio:

The artists’ installation works transform the perception and experience of places. They intervene with existing spaces aiming to re-contextualize settings and historical meaning. Frequently, political and ethical viewpoints are melded within the beauty of the surface, space or object.

Since 1997, Di Cintio and Ruth’ s collaborative work addresses notions of dormancy, anonymity of makers and interior landscapes. Their work is exhibited in museums, galleries and private collections.

Di Cintio is a full-time professor at Ryerson University, Faculty of Communication and Design, School of Interior Design. She has been educated in Canada, United States, and Europe in the fields of Interior Design, Architecture, Arts Education, Urban Planning, and Philosophy.

Ruth is the director of MFA Interior Design, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons the New School for Design and the lead designer and director of furniture design for Q Collection in New York. She holds a Masters of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design.

Sciarrino holds a BFA from Ryerson’s Image Arts program. She is an emerging artist working in sculpture, installation and photography exploring ideas in material simulation of the uncanny natural environment.

Whibley is an emerging artist/designer currently exploring the themes of interstitial spaces and redressing modernist forms through paper collage and wooden constructions. He holds a BDes in Communication Design with a minor in Illustration from the Ontario College of Art and Design and is one fifth of the fine art collective Team Macho.

Yasui graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design with a BDES in Material Art & Design.  As an emerging ceramicist her current work is developing within the context of porcelain’s historical origin and it’s relationship to the sciences.

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CAN YOU REMEMBER MY DREAM?

In my room I have created a tableau in which the subject’s dreams are put on display. Viewers are invited to observe and interpret the imaginings of a figure sleeping in the centre of the room. These dreams are presented in the form of glowing scenes floating above the bed. The imagery in the piece is intended to walk the line between the light-hearted and uncomfortable, and as a result can be interpreted any number of ways according to the participants wishes. The goal of the work is to create an environment where viewers feel they have entered into a stolen moment, and they are encouraged to become voyeurs of the most intimate kind.

Biography

Hepburn was raised in Mississauga Ontario, the younger of two girls and the daughter of an Ontario College of Art and Design graduate. As such, art was a constant in her life. In 2005, she graduated from McMaster University with and Honors Degree in Fine Arts though it was two years later that she decided to pursue a career as an artist. Since then she has lived and worked in Toronto, currently creating work out of her Spadina Avenue apartment.

Though Hepburn often produces two-dimensional works, including chalk pastel and acrylic paintings, the main focus of her art has been the production of dioramas.  She has participated in a number of group exhibitions at such galleries as  Whippersnapper, The Art Gallery of Mississauga, Resistor and Prime Gallery. Her works have also earned her the Best Sculpture Award at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition in 2008 and 2009.

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Artist Statement

Sometimes you just have to get up and go, and sometimes you aren’t the only one.  This is one of those times.  The idea behind Recent Departures is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Departures need not be sad, for they are simply the beginning of an arrival.
“The ride does not require explanation, just occupants.”

Biographies

WORK/PARTY is a loose collective, occasionally pulled together when the stars are perfectly aligned. Over the last few years they have stumbled, crawled and leapt out of art and design schools on either coast of the country. Since graduating, Johnstone has been working at Pylon, Wright at Small Design, Newhouse is continuing her involvement with the Institute Without Boundaries at George Brown, and Braden, Dudek and Kawai are working at Bruce Mau Design. They share a desire to work with companies, individuals and institutions who are interested in making things better. With a few years of work experience they feel a renewed energy to explore and produce with the enthusiasm and naivety of amateurs. Though they have long been fans of Come Up To My Room this will be their first time as participants.

recentdepartures.com

Artist Statement

Ballroom

Inside Ballroom, a small found object is collected, amassed and repurposed to reconfigure the hotel room and achieve a large-scale spatial transformation.  The visitor experience oscillates between the confrontation with solid mass and the occupation of empty space that is enveloped by, contained inside, left over from and altered by, a solid.  Ballroom is a place of contrast, where perception and experience flip from the familiar to the unexpected.

Biographies

Davis and Phelan first crossed paths in New York City while designing hospitality projects. A shared passion for creating spaces of spectacle and interaction, combined with their studies of architecture and interior design, result in designs that transport the audience into unique, memorable places.

Davis is currently working towards her Master of Architecture at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape & Design at the University of Toronto. She has studied in Rome and has worked with design and architecture firms in New York, Toronto and Madrid. Her current interest is the potential crossovers between art, dance, and architecture.

Phelan graduated from the Interior Design program at Parsons School of Design, after which she worked on hospitality design projects throughout the United States. She is currently working in New York as a trend forecaster as well as pursuing residential design projects both in New York and Toronto.

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Undertaking Acquisition – Chronicles of Our Time

We have brought the Archival Library of Found Treasures to the Gladstone Hotel and invite you to participate in the lost and found of priceless objects. Welcome to a dazzling array of unique items, paragons of the Toronto region. Bring your micro frippery, gimcrack cutting, divorced doodads, fandangle filaments and the odds of your analog widgets. Exchange it for a virtuously reputable fare! Come see a collection like no other. There is something for everyone, and everyone can walk away with something.

Step into the world of imagination…welcome.

Biographies

With backgrounds in theatre, industrial design and sculpture, Greyson, Lieu, and Lo have come together to create room 202. Influenced by natural cycles, a fascination with collections, and an all around interest in cultivating stories of existing humanity, the trio have put their magical touch on a room that will take you to another world ‐ a place like no other ‐ where stories unfold and new experiences are shared. In order to continue this trail of treasures lost and now found, will you partake in the foreign exchange with them?

Blog:

http://takenfromroom202.wordpress.com/

Photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/takenfromroom202/

Portfolios:

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Sponsor:

homecanning.com/can/

This quartet’s room treads the fine line between fact and fiction, science and art, confusion and creativity, and breakthroughs and breakdowns. Through cross-disciplinary techniques, the work is simultaneously technical and accurate, naive and romantic, and speaks to a renewed wonder in the world and the things that surround us, what we with to surround us.

Keophila, F. Lim Tung, K. Lim Tung, and Margono were brought together by a mutual admiration for each other’s work.

Biographies

This quartet’s room treads the fine line between fact and fiction, science and art, confusion and creativity, and breakthroughs and breakdowns. Through cross-disciplinary techniques, the work is simultaneously technical and accurate, naive and romantic, and speaks to a renewed wonder in the world and the things that surround us, what we with to surround us.

Keophila’s current practice includes embroidery, cutwork, illustration and papercutting. Her themes vary from relationships, communication, identity and Canadiana but always centre around control, repetition and creative manipulation.

F. Lim Tung received a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto. She teaches architecture, and has received several awards for her work which deals largely with contemporary considerations of traditional types, small spaces, and craft techniques.

K. Lim Tung’s work has been widely exhibited and published, and is sold internationally. Her work focuses on the play between the familiar and the whimsical and expresses a nostalgic connection to material culture.

Margono received his graphic design degree in 2007. He currently works as a freelance graphic designer, with recent clients including Underline Studio and his Mom’s church friends. He is a practicing bureaucrat by day and illustrator by night.

keophila.com

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Virtually all human sensory experiences are obtained via external input. We are constantly bombarded with external sensory information while so many of our essential internal bodily processes and infrastructures go unnoticed. Our objective is to represent the opposing forces (health and disease, restoration and decay) that exist within our internal systems by engaging the viewer in a visceral manner. As opposed to creating objects to be adored or revered, our intention is to create an environment that exposes the viewer’s inner somatic experiences.

Biographies

Both artists are graduates of the York/Sheridan Joint Program in Design, as well as the Bauhaus Universität, Weimar. Previous installation artwork includes the Apolda Design Exchange and the DeLeon White Gallery.  Their aesthetic and conceptual methods are largely informed by German and Swiss schools of thought. A pervasive minimalist sensibility arises from the combination of self-imposed constraints, process driven design, and material experimentation.

Presented by Alchemy

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As a tableau vivant that re-enacts a past time and experience when the bed chamber functioned as site of display, as audience chamber, as symbol of power – both political and sexual – as theatre and as realm of slumbering possibility, Bed Memory aims to construct a kind of spatial choreography through which one or more visitors engage with the bed.  Becoming part of a proscribed narrative, but conditioned by the accidents of individual participation, participants experience a heightened perceptual awareness and engage in a phenomenological encounter that both creates and evokes memory. Ultimately, the bedroom becomes a space of accumulated recollections, performances of past and present, familiar and foreign, individual and collective, prosaic and profound.

Biographies

As a tableau vivant that re-enacts a past time and experience when the bed chamber functioned as site of display, as audience chamber, as symbol of power – both political and sexual – as theatre and as realm of slumbering possibility, Bed Memory aims to construct a kind of spatial choreography through which one or more visitors engage with the bed.  Becoming part of a proscribed narrative, but conditioned by the accidents of individual participation, participants experience a heightened perceptual awareness and engage in a phenomenological encounter that both creates and evokes memory. Ultimately, the bedroom becomes a space of accumulated recollections, performances of past and present, familiar and foreign, individual and collective, prosaic and profound.

Unterthiner is a recent graduate of the John H. Daniels school of Architecture at the University of Toronto where he completed a master’s thesis on Cinematic Architecture, and earned the RAIC Medal as well as the AIA Henry Adams Medal. His passion for film and art practice is something he cultivated while at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has greatly informed his academic architectural career. It is the intersection of cinema, art and design that Unterthiner aims to continue to develop in his professional practice.

A graduate and medal winner from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Ferrari’s current focus as a professional designer is new concept commercial projects within an interior, graphic and architectural context. As a designer for II BY IV, he has lead numerous award winning projects ranging from retail design, restaurant and hospitality design as well as, multi-dwelling residential design. Ferrari’s current obsession has been retail design and its relevance within contemporary society. In addition to his professional design work, he is an instructor at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

bedmemory.blogspot.com

A room remembers.

Inhaling light and sound and thought … Its inhabitants are forever … Absorbed … By soft silent lungs

The room holds … Breath … Keeps secrets

In silence … In the shadow of a turned back … The room exhales … Murmuring its contents … As breathing … Points in time

A room remembers.

Hamlyn metaphorically opens the room – coaxing it to reveal its organic structure by draping it in hand embroidered Gampi tissue paper, reminiscent of layers of dissected lungs. As if remembering every interaction, every conversation, the room is revealed to be many layers of tissue, each a breathing point in time.

Biography

Hamlyn is intrigued by the possibilities of textiles – of textures and fibres to evoke emotion. Believing our sense of touch is one of the most powerful and profound vehicles of human experience, she is drawn to materials with strong tactile qualities and uses these as metaphors to explore experience.

Hamlyn is a graduate of Sheridan Institute’s Crafts and Design Program (Textiles), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her studio work has earned numerous awards and been shown across Canada and throughout Chicago. Most recently, her work was selected for inclusion in the International Craft Biennale in Cheongju, South Korea, the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, and a North American touring exhibition curated by the Canadian Craft Federation. Hamlyn is a member of the Ontario Crafts Council and the Toronto based Contemporary Textile Coop.

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Gold Line

Tataryn’s application of neon tubes of coloured lines of will integrate with Billio’s elegantly designed living spaces to give a poetic construction to their installation.
Billio has been including perfectly straight lines of lighted thread in his designs, so that the generation of bent lines of light with personal interjections of Tatayn’s work will make this an interesting evolution of the designers’ free association.

Billio is the resident artist at the Gladstone Hotel and  an installation artist, sculptor, and designer. He has gained notoriety for his inventive use of stacking objects and his ability to reinterpret the everyday through spatial and contextual re-appropriation. Billio has exhibited internationally in Milan, London, Miami, New York and LA.

Biographies

As a light sculptor Tataryn is interested in transformation – how light can transform space, create optical illusions, project afterimages, and alter perception. With light there is always a second factor and that is colour, which is very important both for its emotional resonance and for it’s dissonance – it sparks my curiosity.

Apart from his own practice, he works with other artists, designers and architects to execute elements of their ideas in light and neon. Since 1989 he has run his own neon shop that became the foundation for the guerrilla art group Skunkworks/Outlaw Neon. He has been influenced by the simplicity in the design of light sculpture by such pioneers in the movement as Dan Flavin, James

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