Arriving at the Gladstone Hotel last Friday night I innocently walked into a make-out party in the Art Bar. No joke. It involved spin-the-bottle and a mammoth bubble where the daring and horny could crawl in and indulge their lust’s appetite. Meanwhile, in the hotel’s Melody Lounge karaoke night was jumping. The last time I attended the event, a well-meaning waitress advised me that I might want to vacate my chair because she suspected the last patron had urinated on it.
The Gladstone encapsulates all the wonderful weirdness and socially illicit behaviour that hotels generate as places where strangers can meet free from the moral regulation of established communities. It is for this reason that the Gladstone was chosen as the setting for Room Service, an art exhibit organized by 16 U of T Visual Studies students.
Each year, senior Fine Art students can work on a group thesis, known as the senior challenge. The exhibit must take place off-campus and must be financed by student fundraising, which this year totalled over five and a half thousand dollars. As participating artist Magdalena Sabat explained, many of the students did not know each other prior to the project, and so a hotel was a fitting theme seeing as it’s an environment where strangers come together to affect the same space at the same time. Though the hotel space provided a shared theme each student approached the topic differently, ensuring a wide range of creations.
The most effective pieces were ones that conversed with the hotel’s surroundings. Charlene Lau’s Think soy-sauce-on-paper text series examining the power of words in shaping people’s identity had its theme reinforced by its placement on a graffiti-covered wall. A missing person sticker on a grungy bathroom mirror enhanced the creepiness of Ellen Lin’s digital print of a girl entangled in a swarm of fish.
The success of pieces tied to their surroundings was perhaps best exemplified by Lauren DiMonte’s embryonic sack-like growths, which oozed throughout the exhibit. I actually had to confirm that this was art and not a newly discovered fungal species. It worked as a comment on hotels as places haunted by past vices.
Other works took a more humorous approach. Samuel Chow’s Sex Me Up video, which literalized making love to the camera, drew on the smuttiness of hotels as the dominant setting for honeymoons, extra-marital affairs and prostitutes. Mark Prier’s hunting cabin featuring racoon roadkill and Nintendo’s duck hunt made an amusing comment on the marketability of Canada’s mythic past, appropriate to the Gladstone, which also capitalizes on nostalgia.
In the exhibit’s program notes, Ziyad Ali comments on how young artists can face indecisiveness with so many possible themes and media, yet he concludes, “it is agreeable to experience new possibilities and dabble in several spheres. I think I shall stay a while longer with indecision.” Given the exciting range of works that these artists produced for Room Service is testimony to the experimental creativity that the uncertainty of youth can inspire.
