By Kim Fletcher
Take a stroll down King Street just a little past Jarvis to the Arts on King. Head inside to the Wagner Rosenbaum Gallery and you’ll see a sign that says ‘Profusion’ and a flight of stairs. Inside you’ll find the curator, Filiz Klassen, a soft-spoken woman who is also an assistant interior design professors at Ryerson.
Since Thursday, Feb. 22, Klassen has been using the gallery, at 169 King St. East to display Profusion, a multimedia design exhibit that Klasss got the idea for while teaching one of her classes in 1997.
“I was inspired by my students,” says Klassen. “I wanted to open horizons for students [so that] they could explore [their] creative side.”
Klassen felt that her students needed to be inspired by everything from fashion to architecture, or even 3-D animation.
Klassen’s idea for Pro-fusion was born out of worries that students felt they could only be inspired by other interior designers. “They forgot to look out,” says Klassen.
Pro-fusion combines architecture, fashion, graphic design and new media allowing professionals the chance to work together.
“Working in interior design allows you to work in lots of different areas,” says exhibition assistant Michael Steele. “You get to wear different hats.”
One interesting design was the inflatable carpet. It is a deep pile carpet over an inflatable rubber mat and a steel baseboard. When the carpet is blown up it can rise about a half metre in the centre.
Philip J. Hollett’s The Tickling House model looks like a big wooden make-up bag, or maybe a medium-sized wooden purse.
“Philip got the idea after hearing about a poem in an English garden,” says Steele. “The model represents the church and the church represents the body.”
After fumbling a few times, Steele and Klassen open the model.
It was several drawers inside. Some are see-through while others have little grooves that only need a finger to open them.
According to Steel, the model is suppose to suggest that, “You can only have fun for awhile and then [the fun] loses its meaning and becomes monogamous.”
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