/Get Inspired/Toronto Design Week 2018
Best of Design Week, Day 2: A Dear Deer, Plum Pendants & Cool Snow Tools
Entitled #ohdeer, global architecture, design, and planning firm, Gensler, deposited a hot pink two-storey tall paper buck in the lobby of a condominium. A nod to the hooved animals that used to grace and graze the now highly populated area, the piece is in fact a piñata whose contents will spill this weekend. (2 St. Clair Avenue W.)
365 Days. Kudos to the festival organizers for choosing the echoing hallway at Artscape Youngplace to display a year’s worth of Instagram posts about Canadian design by Joy Charbonneau. Walking the length of the corridor is humbling; design veterans will be astounded by the number, and quality, of objects bearing the “made in Canada” stamp. (Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw St.)
Cast Pendant Lights. Toronto natives Tom Chung and Jordan Murphy unveiled a prototype for these starkly modern lights, whose delicate-yet-impactful proportions surprise in real life, at TO DO in 2014. Fast forward to today, when the Pendant lights are in production by leading Danish brand Menu. Who doesn’t love a rags to riches story? (Average, 1081 Queen St. W.)
A Discourse on Perception. At Daniels Spectrum we were treated to an astonishing optical illusion by artist Justin Mencel. The hybrid sculpture-painting is hand-made of custom built interlocking wood substrates that appear to reach out to the viewer while retracting into the gallery wall behind it, challenging our sense of perception as we try to evaluate object and representation at once. Suffice to say it’s cool and superbly done. (Daniels Spectrum, 585 Dundas St. E.)
Looks are deceiving with this little army of useful/useless objects by Michael Fohring. Occupying the front window of Labour of Love in Cabbagetown, each unassuming ceramic piece is a true feat of industry and engineering, including such steps as plaster casting, scanning and digital manipulation, 3D printing, mould making and recasting. They're all for sale, too, but we were hard-pressed to choose just one. (Labour of Love, 223 Carlton St.)
Woodshop, an annual show put on by Ontario Wood, the City of Toronto and IIDEX Canada, showcases prototypes made from urban wood damaged by natural and man-made causes. It’s an overlooked but readily available material put to good use by a variety of innovative designers. We love this sleek Wye-Rocker chair by Bod Dodd and Di Tao of Objects and Ideas. Inspired by Southern Ontario marshlands, its curvaceous solid ash body is sports car-esque, its sexy sling seat both a cozy and classy touch. (Commerce Court, West Tower Lobby, 199 Bay St)
Also found at the IIDEX Woodshop show is this set of snow tools by Adam Shepperdly of Shepp Industrial Design Inc. We love the stowable size, easy grip and ideal weight of the ice scraper, mini shovel and snow brush and that these attractive (!) tools are made locally from fallen ash. (Commerce Court, West Tower Lobby, 199 Bay St.)
Hamaca. Tables, Chairs and Unrelated Objects is a show we look forward to seeing every year. Celebrating the work of graduating OCAD U furniture makers, the objects on display are always impeccably made, innovative or cheeky – some are all three. One item that stood out is this peach-coloured standing Hamaca by Pablo Munoz. Hailing from Colombia, Munoz riffed on his country’s traditional fabrication methods using instead angled truss bridges to support the fabric for a more urbane look. (Daniels Spectrum, 585 Dundas St. E.)
TBT: Still Life. At the same show but on the cheekier side of design is J. Thomas Kim’s TBT: Still Life. Made from concrete, brass, polystyrene foam, aircraft cable and found objects, this diorama seems to poke fun at work/life balance and the “precarious work of vanity”. Inspired by labour, Kim performed “an exercise in futility” perfectly. (Daniels Spectrum, 585 Dundas St. E.)
Second year OCAD U industrial design students partnered with the Yonge Street Mission to develop marketable textile goods to be sewn and distributed by Regent Park’s Creative Women’s Collective. Designed with price points, availability of materials and innovation top of mind, the products chosen to be put on the market will be made by the Collective who in turn will receive the proceeds. What an excellent program for all parties. We especially loved Aylin Erzurumluoglu’s reversible, wrappable hoodie-scarf for its fashion- and street smarts. (Yonge Street Mission, 306 Gerrard St. E.)
We’re out tagging the best products, designs and installations we encounter at the Toronto Design Offsite Festival (TO DO) and the Interior Design Show (IDS). Here’s our second dispatch from the wilds of Toronto.
From January 15 to 21, we’re awarding 100 Designlines Loves tags to the most beautiful, most innovative, and flat-out wackiest stuff we encounter. Keep track of everything we tagged in our master list and share your stories with us using the hashtag: #DLLoves18. Happy trails!
On Day Two of our Loves Tagging adventure we travelled north to St. Claire and Yonge – where we came face to face with a giant pink deer – and down through Rosedale and Cabbagetown to get to Gerrard and Dundas Street East. After a tour of the Daniels Spectrum building (by Diamond Schmitt Architects) we raced over to the Design Exchange before dropping into Commerce Court in the heart of the Financial District. At night, we joined the crowds at Average, where Tom Chung and Jordan Murphy launched their Cast Pendant Light for Menu.
In total, we handed out 10 Loves tags to some very deserving stuff, including the curator of an ambitious archival project, an army of “pet objects,” a set of snow tools crafted from fallen ash, and a student built peach-coloured, steel-framed hammock we’d so very much like to curl up into right this second. Swipe through the gallery above to see everything we loved.
