Take a Load Off, 2013

Tongue & Groove - Toronto, Canada

Interactive Installation

This installation creeps through an alley: a centipede assemblage of found furniture. Drawn in by the familiar fabric patterns of matured sofas, you follow a trail of footstools into spotty light behind a brick building. There you find a segment of your uncle’s old couch butted up against some fluorescent pleather. Crooked lamps illuminate a collection of art that has been found on the curb: waiting-room-style watercolours, faded prints, yellowed, matting. Carved wooden frames splinter into cheap plastic.

Take a Load Off skips between found-object art construction and that deflated armchair from the dumpster behind your apartment building. Pieces are spliced together to form a living room that stretches around corners and hunkers down inside shipping bays. Cozy and surreal, this landscape encourages you to snuggle up and stay a while, rest your feet and mingle. Enjoy the slippage between interior and exposed spaces, between the familiar and the strange. As you sink into the groove of the cushions, discover the quiet stories worn into these objects.

Tongue & Groove use reclaimed materials to make participatory installations that engage a broad range of audiences through their tactile, playful, and critical nature. They have shown at Art Spin, Board of Directors, and XPACE. Tongue & Groove is: Simon Black, Kailey Bryan, Robert Clements, Maggie Flynn, Jeannette Hicks, and Meghan Scott.

Learn More

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40

Ditty Lane, Queen Street East & Berti Street (Enter Ditty Lane from Berti Street, south of Queen Street East)

This project is outdoors.