Come Up To My Room (CUTMR) at Toronto’s historic Gladstone Hotel is always a January highlight. The four-day event happens at the same time as Toronto Design Week and the Interior Design Show, making it a good time to visit Toronto if you’re into art and design. Artists take over four floors of the hotel and animate the spaces with site specific, immersive art and design installations. The majority of the time the artists are on site, so you do get the chance to speak with them about their work. I’ve been attending this event for the past few years and I marvel at the creative ways that spaces are altered from year to year. Artists are selected based on portfolios, not on proposals and projects are presented by individuals, collectives, and multidisciplinary teams.
From the curatorial statement, “Come Up To My Room 2020 is an ecology of multiple perspectives and stories where the artists and designers reveal a cosmos: ways of looking within and/or without worlds.”
Here are some of my favourite installations from this year’s show. You can see more on my Instagram.
Untitled, Morris Wazney
Untitled was a popular installation. There was a crowd of people who spent a long time reading each title and having a good laugh. I was one of them. This library is composed of books with fake book titles. Each title was hand stenciled on white book jackets . The exhibition guide says that this was done to bring the focus to content rather than literature, and packaged to appeal to our image driven culture. Mission accomplished.
Subversive Signs, Kal Honey
These signs were displayed throughout all four floors of the hotel and it was fun coming across them. We come across signs in our day to day life all the time, usually they warn us or tell us what we can’t do. These were a nice antidote to that.
Homework, Aaron Jones
Collage constructed from magazines and children’s books. Jones touches on family, masculinity, and melanin.
Plasmic Play, Noni Kaur
This installation turned this room into a microbial world. It traces the agency of cellular, plasmic and parastic forces in human and non-human worlds.
CYB3R, Maxwell Lander
This room came with an Adults Only warning outside the door. This installation was an experimental, multimedia, immersive experience of the queer erotic. The artist invited people to sit on the chair. The spikes respond to sound. I wish that I had gotten to see this room in the evening as some of the elements would have stood out more. It was a nice surprise to see past blog interviewee Jones as one of the photo subjects in the room. (You can read that interview here).
Untitled, Dennis Lim
I enjoy the minimalism of this installation. The pieces are almost jewelry like. This installation will be on display all year in Studio 207 as a long term temporary enhancement . Studio 2017 is a multipurpose meeting, event, and lounge space. This is another installation I’d like to see in the evening.
In This Place, Alexandra Majerus (with the participation of Ewan Atkinson, Bart Sims and Melanie Springer)
Images of the woods complicate the stereotypical notion of a Caribbean beach paradise. The installation centres on Turner’s Hall Woods, Barbados, which has the island’s only remaining pre-colonial vegetation. Its small area (50 acres) underscores the island’s colonial history of violence towards people and land. The visual art was accompanied by audio and a video that showed her collaborators walking through the woods. I have been to Barbados before and I have Caribbean heritage. I hope this installation made people think about the histories of the islands they head to for their beach vacations.
Sound Of A Mud Puddle, Emmie Tsumura
A collection of things remembered, expressed in a constellation of fragmented pieces that reflect upon diasporic longing and recuperation. The work is in conversation with Edo-period artists who documented demon-spirit sightings with the belief that hauntings were caused by disregard or neglect.
Mega Fauna And Other Collisions, Elizabeth D’Agostino
A print media installation project that explores the complexities of the changing landscape, emphasizing how various paths of nature have been interrupted by urban expansion and resource consumption.
The Moon Was The Earth’s Debris, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Technical Design: Jen Rathlin
A couple of days before CUTMR, I had seen some of Yasmeen’s work in a group show called “Friends & Lovers” in Waterloo. Her piece was one of my favourites from that show. The Moon Was The Earth’s Debris deals with adaptation and survival. It speaks to the unavoidable assimilation of immigrant children in foreign communities. Like the Moon, a child born from the Earth they have become an entity of their own yet cannot escape the orbit of the ones that gave them those choices in the first place.
Did you attend CUTMR 2020? What were your favourite installations?
Story by Glodeane Brown
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