Merk!

Site specific installation for the “Come Up To My Room” design festival at the Gladstone Arts Hotel, Toronto, Canada.

Year: 2012

Team: Anca Matyiku, Chloe Doesburg, Duncan Patterson, and Brady Del Rosario

Merk! explored the dreams, stories, and traces of inhabitation that are continuously erased from hotel room bed sheets.

The installation was conceived as a mixture between a sheet fort and a hide-and-seek labyrinth flooded by a dim red light.  A short hallway provided a threshold between the crowded, bright, and overheated upper-level lobby of the hotel and it guided the visitor into the cool soft folds of bed sheets smelling like fresh laundry.  Upon entry, the visitor was given a small blue flashlight.  Under the inquisitive light of the blue light one could discover playful allusions to events that the seemingly anonymous and pristine sheets might have witnessed through the transient inhabitation of the room’s previous occupants.

There may have been stolen kisses and jokes about taking turns at clandestine sheet groping.