The Gladstone Hotel launches Grow Op: Exploring Landscape and Place in April 2013. The only exhibition of its kind in Canada, this four-day tour de force exhibition presents indoor conceptual landscape installations in the rooms of the Gladstone Hotel’s second-floor gallery. Landscape designers and artists are invited to create highly conceptual landscapes inside seven rooms (approximately 100 square feet each) and throughout the gallery hallways and spaces of the Gladstone.
Grow Op celebrates innovative ideas and conceptual responses to landscape and place across a broad range of creative practices. The “Come Up To My Room” of landscape design, Grow Op 2013 will facilitate a cross-disciplinary forum for landscape, garden design, art and place-making within the vibrant setting of the Gladstone Hotel and Toronto’s West Queen West neighbourhood.
Grow Op will explore new territories and uncover new ways of expression and meaning through projects that represent a wide range of approaches from the prosaic to the poetic, the elemental to the ephemeral. The exhibition features over 20 exciting designers and artists including Susan Rowe Harrison, F_RMlab, ERA Architects, Robert Cram and Matt Caudle, Karen Abel, Nick Sweetman and many more.
The Grow Op jury is comprised of: Victoria Taylor, Vanessa Eickhoff, Andrew Jones, David Young, Andrea Mantin, Netami Stuart, Lorraine Johnson and Jiva Mackay.
Curator Victoria Taylor is an OALA-licensed landscape architect and founder and principal of Victoria Taylor Landscape Architect (VTLA). VTLA designs spaces informed and inspired by context, ecology, community engagement and social and horticultural possibilities. The firm employs an open, creative and collaborative design process. Taylor is an editorial board member and contributor to GROUND magazine and is an independent landscape critic at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Landscape, Architecture and Design at the University of Toronto. VTLA is co-creator of Parks & Rec, an 1800 square foot organic roof garden in Parkdale and is currently working with Toronto’s West End YMCA on the design and installation of a rooftop food garden. Taylor’s Concrete Bloom Burst installation for Canada Blooms 2012 won the Evergreen Brickworks SEED Award and the Leslie L. Solty Memorial Award for best overall creativity in garden design.
The opening reception takes place from 7:00pm to 10:00pm on Friday, April 26, 2013.
For a complete list of exhibitors, please visit the Gladstone’s website at www.gladstonehotel.com/event-pages/exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/gladstone-grow-op/.