Jun
13
Last year, I was completely disappointed in myself for missing out on the Gladstone Hotel’s annual Come Up to My Room (CUTMR) show. The 3-day event, which features Canadian designers and artists exhibiting works that are interior or lifestyle based, had many items reproduced for sale, one of which I coveted immensely. Nate Archer’s Timpins, to me, was the best example of taking a Canadian legacy, Tim Hortons, to a whole new level in pop culture.
Nate cleverly converted the Tim Hortons, timbits, into small buttons. So genius! This is art meets commercialism at its best! But it’s so much more! It’s like franchising on the franchise, and the franchise is a comment on who Canadians are and what Canadians are like. It’s about how the Canadian identity is rooted in a very humble history – a hockey player, his hometown roots, a coffee and donut being a reward for an honest days’ work – and how the thing that carved Canadians into their own, was not really the donut, but the donut hole. The negative space. The thing that is usually discarded. The “sweet nuthins” as other donut chains have coined.
Canadians as sweet nuthins. Does that not say it all?
After the 2007 CUTMR show, I tried to locate the Timpins on my own, and failed. Nate didn’t offer them for sale on his blog and I had no idea where to turn. Until recently, where after relaying my Timpin tryst to a total stranger at Type Books, (this is how sad I’ve been; pathetic, I know!) they informed me that the Gladstone in partnership with Motherbrand runs an all-year-round online store called The Souvenir Shop where Nate’s Timpins are always for sale. Amazing!
The Souvenir Shop sells tons of neat stuff by Canadian creatives. Anneke von Bommel is responsible for the Shop’s quirky Antler Ring. Cynthia Hathaway provides fabulous sculptures in series that read like a film negative, incorporating the surface the sculptures sit on as part of the story the work conveys. Stephen Cruise’s Leaves of Room 412 look like they can instantly “Canadianify” any space, anywhere.
The goods truly interpret Canadiana so that no piece, even if all pieces were in a room, purport anything Canadian about it (another Canadian characteristic) regardless of content or imagery. Just another example, of Canadians’ behind-the-scenes contribution to the world.
For now, I’ll invest in some Timpins, hopefully making my way up to some of the other designer goods. It will be my small way in identifying with my fellow Canucks; thinkers and artists. It will be my little contribution of filling up the hole.
Comments
Thanks so much for the kind words. By all means buy a set from the gladstone of the online shop. Let me know how you like them.
Nate, the buttons truly are fantastic. Is the book project on souvenirs still a go? A couple of years back, I believe it was the Ministry of Tourism and Culture Canada, created an incentive for design agencies out there to produce unique items about Canadian stuffs as an interpretation of the “souvenir.” Some of the results from the top design firms were disappointing. I think Hahn Smith Design put out a book (the souvenir on the idea of “souvenir”)which seemed (from what I can remember) like it just hadn’t been taken to the next level. Then again, who knows what the brief specifications were all about.