Interior of Design

While I’ve been in Vancouver visiting family and friends and doing research like crazy, I’ve also been trying to stop by some of the shows that are up in the city right now. And last weekend I went to the opening of the “Interior of Design” group exhibition at the Republic Gallery downtown.

The gallery is sort of a funny space on the third floor of an older (well, older for Vancouver) building on Richards above a record shop. And even though it was only 18 degrees out and breezy, the gallery was swelteringly hot (we later discovered a heater was on full-blast in the corner, which may have been why). But the quirky architectural space of the gallery worked really well with the show’s theme, which aims to “re-arrange the margins between art object, furnishing and architecture as they collectively relate to art – and the act – of interior design.”

Curated by Jordan Strom, the founding editor of The Fillip Review (pretty much my favourite art publication), the exhibition features a great mix of media and approaches to representing the new aesthetics of modality and bargain-basement modernism in condo-crazy interior design. Fittingly, a lot of the pieces in the show were therefore subtle and minimalist in scale and design, but for the most part they were also beautifully and meticulously crafted, again pointing to those blurry zones between design and art, furnishings and sculpture.

Samuel Roy-Bois, who has a solo show up the street at the Contemporary Art Gallery, contributed a framed insulation/cotton batting in his trademark rough-and-ready painted white frame that looks like a segment out of his renowned Ghetto installation.

Samuel Roy-Bois, Ghetto, 2005

Mounted alone on its own wall, Roy-Bois’s all-white piece is completely representative of his practice and interest in alienating architectural spaces, but could also easily be mistaken for a monochromatic modernist painting from a distance. Next to his sparse work, Brandon Thiessen’s series of photographs of curiously-shaped void spaces in domestic interiors that had been filled with subtle geometric patterns and colours, seemed riotously colourful. Thiessen’s work was new to me (and I can’t find images for him anywhere since his dealer, Lawrence Eng, is currently renovating both their gallery space and website) and he’s someone I’m going to keep an eye on in future.

The only video in the show, by Natasha McHardy and Marina Roy (as “Roy & McHardy”) called George and Jorge, was impossible to hear but still totally hilarious. Not only were their outfits fantastic, but the series of awkward monologues for the camera about decor and interior design in what is a godawfully decorated, faux wood panel, basement hell was ironically and discomfortingly similar to something you’d see on HGTV.

Roy & McHardy, George and Jorge [still]

Focusing more on the decorative side of interior design’s relationship with art, Yedda Morrisson’s gorgeous wallpaper featuring mirrored images of scanned flowers covered one wall of the gallery and hinted at the desire to bring a controlled and highly manipulated form of the natural world into our domestic spaces.

Yedda Morrisson

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the paper had been printed or made (one of my only beefs with the show was the complete lack of wall captions and the fact that only one laminated sheet let visitors know which piece was what and by who), but it was also beautiful to look at. Positioned near to a copy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the piece also made me think about the long history of studies into the psychology of colours and patterns and their influence on our mental states, calling up not only histories of interior design, but also colour theory and Van Gogh’s representations of his own bedroom.