NO MEAN CITY: the Brick Works’ Design by Nature

This weekend I headed to the Brick Works for the market, and also to see a smart exhibition of design installations. Design by Nature is the theme, and the show brings together an array of works from emerging artists working in that fertile, unstable territory between design and art.

First there’s Shrine, by Scott Eunson and Lubo Brezina. It’s a mind-expanding play with perspective – a reconstruction of a Southern Ontario barn, in a distorted, shrunken form that does a mysterious trick with scale. I saw a previous version of it at Come Up To My Room and it was, and is, a tremendous work.

Here’s a previous iteration…

And this is the version at the Brickworks:

Then there is this clever piece, the Slash Pile Bench by craftsman Joel Harrison-Off. The wood is “slash,” i.e. the leftover branches removed from cedar logs after they’re cut, which typically go to waste. I love this piece for its thriftiness and for its bumpy, tactile beauty.

And then Random Sphere by Fly Freeman & Francis Muscat, a combination of LED lights and wood (drawn from offcuts). There are two versions at the Brickworks.

Finally: Node Garden Jack by Fugitive Glue. The young design group have worked with salvaged materials (a la Castor) before; this installation’s two jacks are each made from six 100-pound oxygen tanks, once used by welders. They were “inspired by natural occurrences such as starbursts, sprouting seeds, thorns, burrs and tree branch nodes.” I buy that, though these are some surreally large thorns, man-sized and chunky enough to evoke Richard Serra.

 And, apparently, to serve as a playground.