Art for Rooms’ Sake

By Karen Aagaard

Room 214: Made presents Jeremy Hatch

The concept was pretty simple: appoint an eclectic curatorial team; pool together some of Toronto’s leading designers; assign each team one room to transform; invite the masses to poke around the re-conceived spaces. And, bingo: a design show!

But the execution—and effect—of Come Up To My Room was anything but elementary. Turning off-white-walled, empty spaces into conceptual canvases, several dozen of the city’s designerati knocked the proverbial socks off (at least some of) those who ventured to the second floor of the Gladstone Hotel.
“I look through my own peephole all the time,” said Bruno Billo, who collaborated with artist/designer Matt Nye to create one of the event’s more surreal room re-creations. “And let me tell you, I’ve seen some crazy things happen outside my room.” Indeed, Billio (also the Gladstone’s Artist in Residence—hence, perhaps, the oddball “hallway happenings”…) and Nye positioned a makeshift peephole not on the door of their room, but near the window. And what one saw through this peephole mimicked one of their room’s central furnishings: a virtual—that is, projected—wooden chair.

Room 209: Bruno Billio and Matt Nye

Down the hallway from Billio and Nye’s creation, we came across a slightly less “serene” transformation of space; dizzying juxtapositions of words and colour suggested this room was somehow inspired by Douglas Coupland, Marian Bantjes, Burton Kramer and Paul Butler. Turns out, this inspiration could be “smashed” into a penny—if you simply inserted two dollars, plus a penny, into the Motherbrand Penny Smash machine standing lonely in the centre of the room. And why was said machine standing lonely? Our guess was the $2 “smash” fee. (Hey, we didn’t have any change in our pockets, either.)
Most of the rooms, however, seemed to achieve the curators’ desired effect; instead of simply using the space(s) provided as a neutral backdrops of sorts (or, uh, as vehicles to promote affiliated hotel souvenir shops), Come Up To My Room’s designers created spatial playgrounds firmly rooted in the idea of “room.”
While the media was as varied as the designers’ messages, the show’s overarching narrative remained in tact; every space re-presented space, and every room was transformed into surprising amalgams of “public” (gallery) and “private” (one’s room).

Public Space Project: Nicholas Bruscia & Patricia Schraven

All photos by Karen Aagaard