Results tagged “radiantdark”

In the hustle and skelter of Toronto's (unofficial) Design Week—comprised of a massive IDS 09 and its younger alt-bro of a show, Come Up to My Room at the Gladstone, plus MADE's Radiant Dark and a smattering of smaller exhibits and excuses to party—playing favourites is work. How to choose from the million-and-one objects and projections of desire proffered by our city's proliferation of designing minds? It's trickier still when you're dazzled and confused by Swarovski installations or Castor in-jokes, to get to the point of purchase. It's one thing to admire, another to sanely advise someone else to buy.

            

Elegant Corruptions, the best-named art show in town, opened last night with resounding success. It's the second in a now annual series of exhibitions called Radiant Dark and the brainchild of MADE partners Julie Nicholson and Shaun Moore. As Nicholson told us, while the "radiant" part of that equation is probably clear, the "dark" might need more explaining. It refers to the "perceived obscurity of Canadian design"—the exhibits are something of a call to arms, a vivid demonstration of just how active a design community we have. (Toronto, as she points out, is the second-ranked city in North America for design work.) While the notion sometimes gets short shrift, Nicholson believes that there is undoubtedly a Canadian aesthetic, which she characterizes as clean, rooted in modernism, and "definitely concerned with a question of identity."