SLANTED/ENCHANTED

January 21 - February 26, 2022
*No opening reception due to current restrictions

Adrianus Kundert, Calen Knauf, Castor, Chris Kabel, Dach&Zephir, Earth Landing Project, Evey Kwong, Jamie Wolfond, Joyce Lin, Julian Gregory, Keillor MacLeod, Klemens Schillinger, Marco Campardo, Maria Hupfield & Kathryn Walter, Rebecca Sun Collins, Shigeki Fujishiro, Sina Sohrab, Studio Satel, Tom Chung, Théo Leclercq & Camille Viallet 

Curated by Jamie Wolfond

SLANTED/ENCHANTED is part of DesignTO Toronto's annual design festival.

“But oh well — I don’t know what design is. I often say, anyone who feigns to know what it is confounds a fragment from his own disciplinary knowledge with everything else.”—Enzo Mari

The complexity of design — and what, in part, makes it endlessly captivating — lies in its myriad functions. Design involves utility, aesthetics, ethics, anthropology, technology, economics, ecology. Objects are often the center of attention, but an object also gestures to a particular way of thinking that led to its creation. The twenty designers exhibited here play with the permeability of design, each approaching the project from their own distinct perspective and maintaining their own idiosyncratic visual language along the way. Like any liquid, the works on display might best be understood as a flow. A flow of raw energy, configured in the moment, each outcome becoming its own manifesto on making. 

Works featured in the installation build upon the traditional design canon in terms of form, content, and process. This exploratory approach begins, for some designers, as playful yet labor-intensive exercises, while other designers improvise with unconventional materials. Still others appropriate industrial processes, reinterpreting them within the realm of the handmade. The resulting exhibition offers constellations of objects that map creative interests outside of industrialization and mass-production. These juxtapositions provoke new associations and responses, revealing the complex layers of meaning, reference, and possibility in design today. A grand experiment in alternative methods, Slanted / Enchanted presents a palimpsest of ideas and aesthetics that both subvert and respect design’s kaleidoscopic legacy.

- Tiffany Lambert

Documentation by Sean Davidson