From April 24-27, 2014, Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel has announced the 2nd year of Gladstone Grow Op: Exploring Landscape and Place, a four-day event that celebrates innovative ideas and conceptual responses to landscape and place across a broad range of creative practices.
Curated by Victoria Taylor and featuring 26 new projects, Grow Op 2014 is the Gladstone Hotel’s annual alternative landscape and urban design event, celebrating innovative ideas and conceptual responses to sustainable placemaking across a broad range of creative practices. Through video, sound, performance, participatory experience, photography, animal parts, new media and the human body, Grow Op presents an immersive exhibition that is provocative and boundary pushing. Embedded into the hotel and its environs, from adventitious niches to feature rooms, the exhibition presents work that explores new territories. The projects symbiotically connect to tell stories about water, memory, urbanism, natural process, public space, everyday materiality, hunting, urbanism and rural food economies.
This is no ordinary journey down the garden path. The diverse range of works featured in this year’s exhibition asks: What is nature? What is natural? And how do navigate through the midst of these layered complexities? Grow Op participants invite us to observe, document, excavate and play in new ways, inspiring us to think and speak differently about space and form, light and colour and the new contemporary landscapes – from rail corridor to neighbourhood park to the open square and the rural counties beyond our boundaries – that shape and influence our towns and cities.
2014 participants include Karen Abel, Jessica Marion Barr, Jaclyn Blumas, Bruno Billio, Jenny Chan, Robert Cram, Nicholas Croft, Eileen Finn, Astrid Greaves, Jonathan Groenberg, Susan Rowe Harrison, Rebecca Jane Houston, [R]ed[U]x Lab, In the Weeds TV, Mary Ivy Martin, Chef Jamie Kennedy, Jamie Kennedy Kitchens, Svetlana Lavrentieva, LeuWebb Projects, Carla Lipkin, Andrea Nesbitt, Karen May, Michaella MacLeod, Sarah MacLean, J. Scott MacIvor, regionalArchitects, Society of Homo Ludens, Studio JayWall, Ben Watt-Meyer, Chef Mario Paz, Lynnette Postuma, Projexity + Gauge, Julia Smachylo, Chef Miriam Streiman, Mad Maple Country Inn.
This year, as part of the Grow Op exhibition Chef Jamie Kennedy, Jamie Kennedy Kitchens, Chef Miriam Streiman, Mad Maple County Inn and Chef Mario Paz, Gladstone Hotel present Equinosh, an ambulatory “feast for the senses” that celebrates the diversity of two local agricultural landscapes – Prince Edward County, 200 kilometres east of Toronto and Simcoe County & Grey-Bruce County, 200 kilometres northwest of Toronto, and present them in the diverse urban context of the Gladstone’s ballroom in collaboration with designer Robert Cram and In the Weeds TV. Equinosh takes place on Saturday, April 26th from 5:00pm to 8:00pm in the Gladstone Ballroom. For more information about Equinosh, please visit www.gladstonehotel.com/spaces/equinosh/.
The Grow Op jury includes: Victoria Taylor, Vanessa Eickhoff, Andrew Jones, David Young, Andrea Mantin, Netami Stuart, Lorraine Johnson, Emily Hogg and Duncan Alexander Forbes.
The opening reception takes place in the Gladstone Hotel’s second-floor public gallery spaces on Friday, April 25, 2014 from 7:00pm to 10:00am. Admission is $10.
For more information on Grow Op, please visit www.gladstonehotel.com/spaces/gladstone-grow-op/.