(top right image caption from pg 87) Inspired by the Gladstone's advanced age, Ryan Legassicke conceived of this setting as an abandoned room rediscovered in the midst of a renovation.

Rooms With a View - Through the scaffolding and into the Gladstone Hotel, Come Up to My Room gathered in the Interior Design Show's after hours drifters and Queen Street scenesters and sent them meandering in and out of 14 revamped rooms on the second floor. Two years in the running, the city's pre-eminent grass-roots design show focused more on creating original spaces defined by site-specific art rather then minimalist furniture.

"We aren't designers," says Pamila Matharu, co-curator along with Christina Zeilder, midwife of the Gladstone's rebirth. This outsider attitude, coupled with the hotel's in-repair status, informed the February show's flavour, which Matharu characterizes as "everything anti-lifestyle."

Nothing evoked this spirit better than the Matharu - curated space Au Courant, in which artists Shanker Bhardwaj and Lisa Kutsukake sat across from one another, hand in hand,, sucking on the tops of two long fluorescent tubes - the room's sparse decoration included a window curtain with a human-hair tassle and the word "Piss" scrawled all over the washroom walls. The show's most popular rooms, however, were those in which people could feel more at home: fancily clad crowds sprawled out on Shelley Lupu and Freddie Towe's broken-mirror bed and zigzagged around the felt-upholstered tables and ethereal Pillow seat by Alberta's Loyal Loot Collective.

A huge buzz surrounded Orest Tataryn's first exhibit as a newly independent artist, having disbanded from design company SWON. People squeezed - four at a time - into a closet to admire the light sculptor's "little Kronenbergs," amorphous glass vessels filled with animated light. In the main room, his central piece was a neon tsunami, which he described as "a big wave, no people, just the fact of the wave coming in."

Working with more traditional materials, Ryan Legassicke exhibited a collection inspired by the age of the hotel. A cupboard stacked with bowls fused together and a rocking chair and table sprouting twigs were complemented by a wall drawing representing a distant past before these objects were invaded by twigs and time. A huge dissected log, Legassicke's bench spanning the length of the hotel's lobby exemplifies what the show hopes to become: a cross between art and design, breeding functional sculpture.

"We want it to be more conceptual, site-specific and hybrid," says Matharu. "In no way do i want it to become the alt-furniture fair."

(bottom right image caption) Orest Talaryn created Tsunami as part of this first solo show since he quit SWON, the neon design firm he co-founded, and his day job as a firefighter.

AZURE magazine, Toronto, may 2005, pg 87.