Website:  Come Up To My Room 2009

This annual event 'Come Up To My Room' at the Gladstone Hotel has its installations upstairs on the 2nd floor and the talk panel of designers in the ball room for those who were curious enough to attend and ask questions from the designers.  The parties continue to be overcrowded and popular with the artsy set along Queen Street West and Parkdale.  Listening to the designers at the panel 'The Origins of the Designer': Andra Hayward, Andrew MacDonald, Jeremy Hatch, Studio Junction and Derrick Hodgson and hosted by co-curator Jeremy Vandermeij, some of whom revealed their financial and artistic struggles, one gets the impression that artists live a complex diverse lifestyle with its complications from lack of funding and market, with a few success stories.  Even if an artist gets known and has shows, the financial and market side continues to be unstable despite education, and employment may have to be from non-artistic sources at times.  But such is the cross that artists take with choosing it as a career, and even some famous artists did not achieve fame and fortune in their own lifetimes, but only after their deaths.  With that in mind knowing the value of artists lives, the value of their art and imagination becomes more poignant and heroic.  To continue to create inner wealth and share it with the public in exhibitions despite lack of external wealth makes it challenging and admirable.  Artists inspire the mind and spirit, enriching culture and society, expand the socialization networks of cities, and should be rewarded with grants and funding.  Government and businesses such as the Gladstone Hotel are supportive of their efforts and the public is rewarded by their inner wealth of ideas.  However, sometimes one wonders at the commercial marketability of some designs, if anyone would buy such a product.  Andra Hayward's 'This is not a Chair' with its soft collapsible foam  material has the shape of the chair but cannot function as is due to its softness because a chair has to be hard enough to carry the weight of a person sitting on it.  Her collaboration in Woolfit's ornate and colourful facade however did beautify the art supplies building.  Andrew MacDonald's knitted forms have no function but remind one of leg warmers that warm dancers legs.  Jeremy Hatch's all white porcelain recreation of hanging hooks and mechanical wood contraptions is strange in that a breakable material is used to copy a hardy labour function.  If real shipping hooks were made of porcelain, they obviously would not be durable enough to do the job.   Studio Junction has a miniature building made of wood and bench on a wall with muted light filling the space warmed by the brown wood colour.  They showed slides of their actual studio workspace home with its spacious interiors but a lack of windows to outside.  Derrick Hodgson had cute little creatures which were little blocks of painted wood and some were made into plastic toys in Japan.  Cute things seem to be marketable for children and youth.  The difficulty in making money from fine art and commercial art is a secret that only a few artists have mastered.  Whether a generous sponsor or the general public will buy the products is an unknown formula, but displaying them is free for all to see.  So take advantage of this and enrich your mind by going to these public exhibitions.