Dear fellow Torontonians did you go to the Interior Design Show this past weekend? If you didn’t make it, don’t fret, Greg Laciak’s best of IDS 12 will be on the blog later this week with his thoughts on what’s new, exciting and on trend in interior design this year.
There are still plenty of exhibitions to take in during the Toronto Design Offsite Festival (TO DO), if you’re kicking around the city and feel like immersing yourself in some amazing design and culture. Here are our top picks, but be sure to take a look at TO DO’s full listing of events:
Stitches
WORKshop Toronto
Runs to February 12, 2012
Admission: Free!
Pieces from Suzhou via WORKshop
The Toronto experimental design centre and gallery, WORKshop, is hosting STITCHES: Suzhou Fast Forward, featuring seven pieces of hand-crafted Suzhou embroidery from China as well as six contemporary works by invited architects, artists, and designers.
The seven hand-crafted embroidery pieces are from the Zhou XueQing Embroidery Art Center in Guangdong, China. These painstakingly stitched works made from fine silk thread picture flowers, birds and landscapes and continue Suzhou’s 2000-year history of embroidering illusionistic scenes. Using this tradition as a springboard for the future of embroidery, WORKshop invited architects, artists, and designers to create original works. Beauty and ingenuity is on proud display in these six contemporary works that employ new technologies, processes, and materials.
Stephen Burks: Man Made Toronto
Design Exchange
Runs to April 1, 2012
Admission: Pay What you Can
Stephen Burks: Man Made Toronto, is a unique project that features industrial designer Stephen Burks’ ongoing exploration of the global economy of artisanal craft. Burks encourages us to reconsider the worth – aesthetically and conceptually – of the handmade object. He has worked with Senegalese basket weavers based in New York and Dakar, as well as projects with artisans in South Africa, Peru and India, and is considered a design activist for his work connecting these artisans with global distribution and marketing. In so doing, he brings social and economic stability to these artisans and their remote communities, while introducing different aesthetics to contemporary design.
Losing Parkdale
Ontario Crafts Council Gallery
Runs to February 26, 2012
Parkdale is a neighbourhood full of artists and as this exhibit showcases, amazing woodworking talent. But woodworkers, artists and artisans are being displaced as condo developers have moved in and taken over usable studio space.
Curated by Joel Robson, with work by Scott Eckertt, John Jackson, Dennis Lin and Joe Yanuziello, this exhibition focuses on the craftspeople that have made their living in this part of Toronto and celebrates the joining of material and mind – with the poignancy of upheaval and resettlement.
Spectral Landscape
Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA)
Runs February 4- April 1, 2012
Admission: Pay What You Can
“Explosions” by Sarah Anne Johnson, via MOCCA
“Bubble” by Sarah Anne Johnson via MOCCA
Organized by MOCCA and the National Gallery of Canada, Spectral Landscape gives the expression “loosing yourself in the wilderness” a whole new meaning. With works by Peter Doig, Sarah Anne Johnson, and Tim Gardner, these artists present striking landscapes that examine our relationship with the natural world. From sublime to hallucinatory, these landscapes mix autobiography with illusion, the banal with the extraordinary.
Well that’s our round-up! Let us know what you thought of this year’s IDS and if you made it to any of the offsite exhibitions!
