Creature chic

Canada's Biennale Bid: animal, vegetable or architecture?

Popped in to the Design Exchange the other night for the presentation of architect and sculptor Philip Beezley’s Hylozoic Ground, Canada’s  juried selection for the 2010 Venice Biennale in Architecture. Hylozoism apparently, is the ancient belief that all matter has life…

And Beezley’s Day of the Triffids-inspired entry, which moved its tiny tendrils toward you responsively was vaguely unsettling. Was it a thing, or a place? Was it sculpture or architecture? Was it an ancient primeval form of life or a vision of the future?

Futurist Fern

 Some in the design-heavy A-list crowd were charmed by its delicacy. But many were perplexed.

Futurist or Primitive?

Beezley sought to set them straight with the explanation that the piece which exhibited the properties of “ozymotic action” was “a reminder that even the ground beneath our feet isn’t really solid but shifting”.

Crazy, man.

Meanwhile, I was distracted from Beezley’s presentation by the incredible futurist/primeval bracelet on the wrist of the guy standing next to me, who turned out to be Toronto interior designer, William Anderson.

George Jensen does Hylozoism

Anderson told me that the piece is Jensen, #163. It was stainless, marked and sized for either a very large woman or a man. When he was just a stripling of 19, he happened upon it at  the pawn shop McTamney’s. Apparently it had been left for pawn by a biker–presumably one with excellent taste.

 Oh, and William’s ring is a piece by local sculptor Gord Peteran.