Most human beings have packrat instincts. It starts in childhood. Think back to hockey cards, Matchbox cars, and comic books. There’s a reason the toy companies urged us to collect the whole set, because we had to have them all. Some people grow out of it, whereas others never tire of that thrill of the hunt. Collecting becomes a passion, an expression of character, and even a livelihood.
The positive side of the accumulation of stuff is on display at the Museum of Vancouver this summer, in an exhibit titled All Together Now. The show launches this Thursday (June 23) and runs right through to January 2017. Viviane Gosselin, the museum’s Curator of Contemporary Culture, handpicked 20 of Greater Vancouver’s most fascinating hunters and gatherers.
“We work with collectors all the time”, says Gosselin. “We borrow objects from them and seek their knowledge on certain subjects. In this exhibit, we wanted to focus on the act of collecting, and feature the collectors themselves, who are usually anonymous.”
The collections on display range from jukeboxes to pocket watches to glass eyes to gig posters to taxidermy of Vancouver-area rodents and birds. That’s right, Gabrielle Whiteley is a self-taught taxidermist, which sounds messy, but apparently isn’t. All of her animals are “ethically-sourced” in that she doesn’t actually kill anything.
Imogene Lim, another collector on display, has amassed a huge amount of Chinese restaurant menus. Yes, menus. It all started when her uncle, who was part of the family restaurant, wanted to see what the competition was up to, so he grabbed every Chinese restaurant menu he could find to compare. Lim became fascinated with the cultural stories the menus told through food offerings, design and pricing, and picked up the practice her uncle started. Some of the menus will be on display.
Also exhibited will be action figures, fly fishing lures, BC transit artifacts, prosthetics (?!), and hundreds of items from Maurice Guibord’s Expo 67 collection, among various other stuff. Most of the displays will feature a hands-on aspect, none more so than Kyle Seller’s vintage pinball machines.
Seller got hooked on pinball as a teenager, hanging out at his local arcade in Coquitlam. Many years later, he’s turned that love into a viable business. He’s the pinball king of Vancouver, and is mostly responsible for the huge upswing of popularity for pinball in this town. Seller has actually lost count of just how many pinball machines are in his collection, but you can find various examples at Landyachtz, Pub 340, What’s Up? Hot Dog!, 12 Kings Pub, and the River Market in New Westminster.
He admits he’s somewhat mystified at having part of his hard-earned and much loved collection on display at an institution like the Museum of Vancouver.
“It’s really bizarre, but extremely satisfying,” states Seller. “I think it’s something I’ll think about for the rest of my life. Never in a million years did I ever think my love of pinball would be recognized by a museum. It’s really cool.”
All Together Now took a year and a half to assemble. Gosselin calls the exhibit “the intersection of many goals. This is a portrait of 20 collectors each with their own cabinet of wonders.”
Gosselin says that despite the wildly different artifacts on display, the collectors all have one thing in common. “Passion. They’re all extremely passionate about what they do. These are the experts in their field, and it shows”.
The Museum of Vancouver hopes to amass a large collection of your admission stubs to All Together Now all summer long.
