Toronto Life

"Our six favourite pieces from Come Up to My Room 2012 (including one we had to get on our hands and knees to see)"

Saturday, Jan.27, 2012.
Curtesy of the Toronto Life
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Toronto Life

"Our six favourite pieces from Come Up to My Room 2012 (including one we had to get on our hands and knees to see)"

Hamutal Dotan, Photos: Corbin Smith
Saturday, Jan.29 2012.
Curtesy of the Torontoist
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Walking from space to space at the Gladstone’s annual Come Up to My Room event (where the hotel surrenders its accommodations to be reimagined by a clutch of designers) is a bit like taking an absurd, down-the-rabbit-hole-type journey though the minds of several artsy archetypes. There’s the minimalist, who works with little more than white Styrofoam and LED lights; the maximalist, whose room is so packed with hundreds of abstract, laser-cut feathers it’s pretty well impossible to enter; the Parkdale hipster, whose half-shorn hair and acid-wash jeggings are more interesting than the art itself; and the conceptualist, whose work is likely very, very deep but will be likely be lost on everyone without a PhD in philosophy. That said, the show, which is on until this Sunday, is exuberantly creative, spectacularly strange, and well worth a visit. Our six favourite pieces after the jump.

Where else will you see Bob Marley, William Shakespeare, Marilyn Monroe and Mother Teresa all in the same place? Gareth Bate’s Jewel Net of Indra, which features tiny hand-painted portraits in the middle of circular mirrors, encourages viewers to look at themselves in the context of great historical figures (we presume because he wants us all to feel very, very bad about ourselves). (Image: Karolyne Ellacott)