True Nordic at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art presents a comprehensive look at the Scandinavian influence on Canadian craft, design and artisans. Curated by industrial-design historian Rachel Gotlieb, the Gardiner's adjunct curator, and Michael Prokopow, cultural historian and Ontario College of Art and Design professor, the major exhibition encompasses 90 years of history and 70 years of design and craft. Historical examples range from Ontario furniture manufacturers to the Atlantic provinces' studio potters, in groupings partitioned by undulating kraft paper soft walls by Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen of Vancouver's Molo Design.
As the co-curators explain, Nordic design arrived in our country in 1925 with the first immigration of Scandinavians to Canada, then again in another wave after the Second World War. The show is deeply researched and persuasively presented to underline an important point: Though Nordic design may favour certain types of shapes, materials and principles, it is not monolithic. The exhibit's Exchange and Adaptation section traces the dialogue of adoption and adaptation between makers through products – a good example is Paul Epp's 1973 Algoma moulded plywood seating system for student common areas in colleges, designed after a stint studying with James Krenov in Sweden. The third section Persistent Variations includes examples since 1990, like Loyal Loot's Log Bowls of reclaimed wood lacquered with colourful acrylic finishes or the graceful walnut Branches Chandelier by Brothers Dressler.
Esme Gotz and Lorraine Levinson admire Canadian studio pottery at the True Nordic exhibition at the Gardiner Museum. Unlike other forms of modernism, Nordic designs offered warmth and bursts of colour, particularly in the pottery and textiles.
JENNIFER ROBERTS FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
The show is extensive and impressive in how it explores and analyzes the humanistic integrity, the common aesthetic language and modesty that both modern Scandinavian and Canadian design share and the decades-long conversation through waves of influence, immigration and interpretation. But on the eve of Canada 150, is it reductive to try to define Canadian cultural identity through cultural products, including design? This show inescapably inches toward doing so. The principal publicity image of True Nordic is of ceramic artist Katherine Morley's blocky slip-cast porcelain Arctic Bookends; shaped like icebergs, they loom like something out of a Lawren Harris landscape and are now design icons in their own right. The stark, graphic impact is well chosen and suggests that the wintry vastness is the answer to that implicit yearning for a narrative.
Philosopher Mark Kingwell's essay "The Idea of North Revisited" neatly bisects True Nordic's exhibition catalogue and covers this ground more explicitly by subversively countering it. The northern outdoors – and how an often inhospitable climate naturally turns one's attention to the comfort of the great indoors – is often attributed as a common temperament that captures our idea of ourselves (see: another recent Scandinavian import, the Danish concept of hygge, or coziness). Kingswell disassembles the well-worn cliché of national mythology by laying out its ironies.
Omer Arbel’s 73 Series Pendant Lamps may tap into a bigger, longer tradition but are confidently, proudly his own.
JENNIFER ROBERTS
He points out how both Canadian and Scandinavian populations cluster to the south of their respective countries, in urban groups, and brings up the fact that few Canadians ever venture to the country's upper latitudes, as well as the reality of endemic poverty and unemployment in the mythic "true north strong and free" that our national anthem references. It doesn't undermine the exhibition's critical lens, but underlines that its ideas are about identity – not reality. Another disparity is that studio design as cultural history can often feel as rarefied as fashion's ready-to-wear and haute couture collections – like picking up a 1956 copy of Harper's Bazaar and extrapolating that it's how many real people dressed, whereas what's found in a Sears catalogue might in fact be more accurate.
It's not that design items aren't relevant to defining the elusive identity (if we could pin one down in a country of pluralities). But, by its own parameters, the bulk of the design in the exhibition isn't exactly vernacular. This is especially the case with the big-ticket soft furnishings and case goods that an ordinary person might purchase only once in the course of a lifetime. At least the exhibition is candid with this caveat, admitting that the audience for these historical examples of Nordic-influenced Canadian goods is the urban and suburban elite and middle-class consumer. While people of all socio-economic statuses, and readers of decor and design publications like Canadian Art, House & Home or Style at Home admire these pieces, they don't necessarily purchase them.
Derek Mcleod’s Leather Sling Chair, Brian Richler and Kei Ng’s Deadstock Floor Lamp and Shawn Place’s SP210 Rocking Chair is seen at the True Nordic exhibition.
JENNIFER ROBERTS FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Stacking Chair by Keith Muller and Michael Stewart and Thomas Lamb’s Roo Chair.
JENNIFER ROBERTS FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL
When trying to explain an entire country through material culture, that's the top-down difference between how we might window shop and aspire to live, and how we do live and actually are.
Lorraine Levinson and Esme Gotz admire Canadian textiles on the wall at the True Nordic exhibition at the Gardiner Museum.
JENNIFER ROBERTS FOR THE GLOBE AND MAIL