Toronto Design Offsite Show

Last Friday night John and I met Shelley Savor at the Gladstone Hotel for the opening night of their annual Alternate Design Show, Come Up to My Room. When we arrived at the 2nd floor lobby for the exhibition a cool projection of visitors in the lobby had just been set up on the balcony overlooking Queen St West.

Visitors were already smoozing and viewing artwork with drinks in hand in the Public Spaces. The show incorporates 11 private rooms as well as the public spaces where artists, designers and architects displayed their works.

In Room 206, for instance, VAERY Studio, a collaboration between two University of Waterloo Architecture students, Richard D'Alessandro and Sonja Storey-Fleming created a surrealistic, architecturally-inspired change to the space.

In Room 201, architectural designer and artist, Wendy W. Fok, of Studio-WF, created dramatically-lit wall and floor installations that connected outlines of cityscapes. You can see the shadow of a cityscape at the bottom end of the installation.

In the public space, John looks up into a hanging installation, Firmament, made up of discarded electronic parts by collaborators, Matthew Blunderfield and Skanda Lin.

Here, I've caught a visitor in front of Sonja Tyagi's wall hanging, Building Ties, made up of numerous bow ties.

After viewing Come Up to My Room on the second floor, we three continued up to the third floor to see Hard Twist 2011- Obsession, an Annual Juried show of Textile-based art. We all loved the original lobby furniture.

We also all loved Keiley Stewart's big animal heads made of felted wool and flax. The heads were complimented across the hallway by photos of people wearing them in parkland along the lakefront.

There was lots to see, Bill and Shelley couldn't resist a little rest on the funky chairs  at the 3rd floor landing.

and John couldn't resist a shot of the old elevator reflected in a stairwell window as we descended to the ground floor lobby.