Toronto’s design community was absolutely buzzing last night as the biggest weekend of the year took off with Radiant Dark II, a showcase for design with a decidedly arty bent. Curated and presented by MADE, a Toronto retail shop dedicated to high-concept Canadian design, the second annual Radiant Dark was an unqualified success.
Hundreds of scenesters poured into the Queen & Dufferin warehouse where a DJ and bar occupied one level and the exhibition dominated another. Thirty-three homegrown design studios brought 39 new works that ran the gamut from messy to refined and from practical to ridiculous.
Radiant Dark is all about pushing boundaries and this year’s theme, Elegant Corruptions, was expressed in a variety of ways. My favorite pieces were Grant Heaps‘s huge Stag patchwork tapestry (pictured after the jump), and Propeller Design‘s Dram chandelier, above, made from the kind of utilitarian kitchen and bar glasses you’d find at any flea market for 50 cents a piece; hung en masse and lit from within the tumblers were transformed into something truly elegant. Another favorite was Yvonne Ip’s Knot (Sitting Object), which some children were romping on, their play illuminating the essential spirit of the piece.
Textile artist Bev Hisey, an accomplished “commercial” designer of cushions and laser-cut carpets, expressed a more challenging side of her muse with Dirty Dishes, a series of round carpets based on petrie dish photographs of viruses and bacteria. Hisey’s work (the carpet above depicts SARS) perfectly distilled the show’s theme and expressed the challenges faced by all artists trying to make a living.
“I like to be able to pay my bills,” Hisey told me, “and that means mostly staying away from conceptual work like this in favour of making pretty things that people want to bring into their homes. But ultimately commercial products end up at Home Depot and I don’t ever want to be in Home Depot. So it’s a challenge to find that balance between art and commerce. It’s why I sell one kind of work in retail shops and do another kind of work for shows like this and for private clients who are more adventurous.”
The Interior Design Show gets underway tonight with a rocking kick-off party followed by trade day on Friday before the event opens to the public Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow, I’ll be covering another interior design showcase, the Gladstone Hotel’s Come Up to My Room, where local artists/designers unleash their creative instincts in a single hotel room.
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