Come Up To My Room 2019
During its annual three-day alternative design exhibition, the Gladstone Hotel was once again transformed into a space featuring a variety of installations that showcased the intersection of art and design. From January 17 to 20, the historical hotel invited visitors to come and experience light, colour, and sound in fun and interactive ways. Come Up To My Room (CUTMR) invites artists to push beyond the boundaries of traditional art and design to create stimulating and immersive installations. Priced at ten dollars for students, the relative financial accessibility allows students to explore and experience art without having to pay the heftier price of most exhibits.
A central theme of this year’s exhibit was reimagining space and scale in creative ways. The exhibit featured more than 20 projects by 50 artists who were encouraged to create installations that channeled a playful lightheartedness. As a nod to the darker atmosphere hovering over the world in 2018, artists were encouraged to dabble with ordinary perceptions of light, colour, and sound to transport visitors from everyday banality to something spectacular.
The exhibit sprawled from the first to fourth floors of the hotel, with installations everywhere—in corridors, hanging from the ceiling, and in the hotel rooms themselves. Upon entering the Gladstone, visitors were greeted not only by the friendly staff, but also by a giant piece of hair hanging above the front desk. “Hair Piece” by Anna Rose hovered in the hotel like a cloud in the sky. It was at once both close and far away; almost within grasp, the silky curls were enticing. In this installation, hair, something so intimate and personal, was displaced from the human body and transported to a different space.
Speaking of different spaces, “TRON209” by Bruno Billio took the everyday living room and transformed it into something that seemed to come from a techno party in space. By taking the everyday background of a studio and recontextualizing it into a black light version of itself, the installation invited visitors to step out of the banal and mundane and into a neon-coloured dreamworld.
Artists continued to toy with the idea of transforming the everyday in installations such as “Penumbra.” In this installation, Becky Lauzon, Johnny Cann, and Michael Rennick took up the corner of one room, filling it with sculptures made from wood and glass placed on top of plastic crates. Windows were cut into each of these sculptures, allowing the lights around them to shine through and give off distinct shadowy backgrounds. The end result was two cityscapes: one physical and static, the other an ever-changing shadowscape encompassing the entire room.
Most installations revelled in transforming space into something fantastical and cheerful, but others enticed visitors through their ability to transfigure space into something that forces us to confront the uncanny and uncomfortable. Ryerson’s [R]ed[U]x Lab’s “Fraktur” was one of these installations. Located in Studio 206, it explored the ways expansion and contraction can be used to create a space mimicking human movement and breath. As you entered the room and approached the jet black walls, they began to expand, like a lung displaced from its organic human body. The room enveloped those who entered into its darkness and forced them to confront the uncanniness of breath decontextualized from an organic atmosphere.
“Eastern Bloc (Collapse)” by Georgina Lee Walker and Youri Makovski also evoked an uncanny and looming sense of sadness and dread. The installation emulated a home in the midst of destruction. Huge chunks of grey wreckage covered the floor while traditional bright carpets hung from the ceiling and wall. This juxtaposition referenced the failed utopian vision of socialism in Eastern Europe and its haunting remains.
Come Up To My Room’s 2019 exhibition was as wonderful and innovative as ever. Combining playful and fun elements of light and space with more eerie and serious effects, the installations compelled everyone to take a step out of the ordinary and into something spectacular.
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