Peturson’s work exhibited in Toronto Design Offsite Festival

Laura Peturson, associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts, is exhibiting at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel as part of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival, Canada’s largest cultural celebration of design.

Peturson’s project, a 16 x 8 foot printmaking installation, is titled Hogweed Forest. It is a print-based project comprised of woodcut, linocut, screenprint and papercut techniques.Hogweed Forest examines the unintended impacts of cultivation, and the accelerating speed of plant invasions due to globalization. The landscape is cast in an active role, with aggressive and unpredictable power, instead of as a backdrop to our daily lives.

Children are depicted as the explorers of this forest because of their tenacity and vulnerability. The simultaneous beauty and danger of the forest is prevalent in children’s stories, and despite the accuracy of the scale relationships, the giant hogweed makes the children appear as diminutive as Alice in the Wonderland garden. 

Hogweed Forest will be at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto for the 2017 Come Up to My Room exhibition, running as part of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival.

In this exhibition curators Jana Macalik, Christophe Jivraj and Lukus Toane have put together a group of innovative creators that will transform all four floors of the hotel with their immersive installations. Events including curator-led tours, design panel discussion, and opening party run from January 19-22, 2017. For more information, visit www.comeuptomyroom.com.

The Toronto Design Offsite Festival features over 100 exhibitions and events forming Toronto’s design week.