Toronto Craft Alert

This is the first installment of our coverage of 3 of the major events happening this week as part of Toronto International Design Festival: Radiant Dark, Come Up to My Room, and the Interior Design Show.

We attended the opening for MADE’s Radiant Dark: Assets & Values in thematically-appropriate Commerce Court on Wednesday night, where photographer Danijela Pruginic and writer Adam Gorley captured the mood and imagery of this always-inspiring event.   It is on until Sunday January 24 so there is still time to check it out (Commerce Court West, 199 Bay Street).

Scroll on for some eye-candy from the event and some musings on value & design by Adam. Please click on images for artist information & click here for more scenes from Assets & Values.

I like furniture, and I like art, and I appreciate quality, durability, and design. I also appreciate cheap, but while it’s possible to find all of the former qualities together, it’s not possible to find the former with the last one. This is actually a major ethical quandary I face (not just with furniture): should I buy a more expensive product of higher quality when there is always a cheaper and lower-quality alternative?

Am I capable of incorporating long-term economics into purchasing decisions? Is there any point?

With all products, the issue is disposability: this is a feature of the vast majority of consumer goods today. The opposite is sustainability or durability, and it is the theme of this year’s Radiant Dark design show.

Well, more precisely, the theme is “Assets & Values” ; that’s at least partly why it’s showing at Commerce Court this year (cheeky, kind of like the rise-and-fall rides on Bay St. at last year’s Nuit Blanche). But behind assets and values are things, materials, and costs, and that pretty much sums up everything that goes in and everything that comes out; everything we make and everything we throw away; everything we appreciate, and remember, and love, and forget.
So I guess that’s what this year’s show is about.

Most every piece was interesting, and many were lovely and thoughtful. Here are some highlights.

Rob Southcott took an old chest of drawers and renewed it in dark blue, with a heavily glazed top, leaving only a trace of the original finish visible in a flowery antique pattern. It is clearly old, but appears suitably modern. It also had a strange drip of glaze frozen from one of bottom drawer pulls. The rest of the piece was so immaculate that I couldn’t tell if it was intentional. A nice intro to the show.

Yvonne Ip is showing lights made from felt cables tied in knots. I found them interesting because they made me think of fibre-optic cables, muscle sinews, explosions, and used cigarette filters.

Bev Hisey‘s piece is a hand-knotted carpet mapping Canada’s reserves of fresh water. The water is quilted in gold silk, representing the immense value of the resource. But it’s a carpet, and made to be stepped on.
The Brothers Dressler collected discarded bottles (“from the turn of the century”; it wasn’t clear which century, but I’m guessing this is an ironic play on notions of antiquity), wood, and iron to create a semi-industrial lamp that probably wouldn’t look out of place in a workshop or a modern living room.

Architects Brezina & Eunson reclaimed wood from an old and dilapidated barn to produce a shrine to barns. The thing expands from the rear interior to the front like light at sunrise, and feels like a memory expanding into mind or contracting into the past. One especially neat feature of this piece is that as far as I could tell it contains no nails or screws.

Anneke van Bommel produced cutlery from vintage flatware and moulded plastic. The pieces fall into two categories: irreverent and functional, and irreverent and useless. The former include spoons that are half silver and half plastic; are they disposable? Valuable? The latter include spoons with designs cut into the bowl and double-bowled spoons. Of course, because they are on display, it’s also hard not to think of tourist spoons.

Jill Allan crafted attractive glass piggy banks, one clear, the other mirrored. One allows the depositor to see the investment; the other makes the investment invisible, but offers a distorted image of the depositor. The banks show two sides of savings and investment: clarity and obscurity. Their status as art objects also says clearly that you have to have money to save money.

Lucy Roussel‘s “Grove series” consists of floor lamps with light panels that feature fossil-like prints of leaves and seeds. Initially I was unimpressed by them, but it occurred to me that these sorts of nature motifs are reminders of life outside cities, and in a future I don’t like to imagine, we might display such things as memories of now-extinct life.

Propeller Design used found stones (along with other materials) to create a 1.5 metre long mountain range diorama and lamp. I’m sure this piece functions better as art than as lighting, but it is interesting nonetheless as an example of introducing memories or experiences of nature into the home.

Brent Cordner recycled newsprint to create “Newsworthy”, a two-metre tall floor lamp with an enormous shade that resembles an old-fashioned Dutch cap. The entire thing has an antique style and is painted black.

Heyday Design offers a lamp made of porcelain cellphones hanging from cables. The individual lights are modelled after older generation phones (think mid- to late-90s). It’s a neat piece, but I think it would be more effective if the lights were actual discarded phones.

Grant Heaps’s quilted flower chair covers were the first thing I saw, and they reveal a dedication, skill, and artistry that is uncommon in consumer goods today. I was not immediately taken with them, I think because these are almost functional, which places them more in the realm of craft than art; but after a second look, I appreciated the tension between these ideals of art and craft that these pieces demonstrate. Also, the quilted flowers remind me of “vintage” computer images: heavily pixellated in blocks of colour, yet somehow quite distinct.

Katherine Morley has used porcelain to create an underwater scene that evokes a future organic city. Porcelain mimics shell, and so is appropriate here. Of course it also represents an idea of fragility, which applies both to our current living circumstances and to the very idea of communal life in the future.

It was a great pleasure to see all of this terrific design from Canadian artists. All of it addressed the theme of sustainability quite well. Some in predictable ways, some novel. At the same time, I didn’t ask about the prices of anything, but I feel pretty confident that what I said at the beginning remains true.

I suppose that’s not quite the issue though. This is more of an awareness project: we can design and produce quality goods in Canada, and we can look on them (in some cases) as functional art. Maybe this is more important: we can also take the old and make it new, even when the old is something that we would usually just toss in the garbage or the recycling bin.

And just so you know, when I distinguish between art and craft, I look to Oscar Wilde’s artificial aphorism: “All art is useless”.  It’s not true, but it’s clear (maybe the next best thing).

Stay tuned for more later this weekend as we bring you news from CUTMR and IDS!