The Collectors

If you think that museums are full of old fossils and boring exhibits, it’s time to get yourself down to All Together Now: Vancouver Collectors and their Worlds.

I went on opening night this week when 20 collectors were hanging out with their obsessions and it’s one of the craziest nights I’ve had in a long time. There were collections of movie posters, pocket watches, pinball machines and action figures mixed in with artificial eye balls, toasters and corsets.

We’re not talking stamp collectors here.

Exhibit curator, Viviane Gosselin came up with the idea. She told me she sent out a call to various collectors about 18 months ago. “I wanted to be blown away,” she says. And she was.

When you walk into the exhibit you hit Angus Bungay, the action figure collector. Viviane  recreated his own room.

“We know that collections are conversation pieces,” she says. “I wanted conversations about the history of disability, conversations about food security–that’s why we have a seed collector.”

Harold Steeves, a descendant from the pioneer Steveston family, collects heirloom vegetable seeds.

“The history of disability is something that fascinates me and I wanted to work with David Moe who collects vintage artificial limbs,” she says. “We are trained not to look and stare at people wearing prostheses and this is the exhibition that says stare all you want.”

Maurice Guibord has close to 5,000 pieces in his Expo 67 collection. He was 13 when the fair was staged in Montreal and he says it opened up the world for him. “It truly changed my life,” he says.

Maurice is placed between Melanie Talkington, a woman who collects corsets and Willow Yamauchi, a journalist with the CBC, who collects Drag Queen outfits, particularly those that relate to her father’s group the Bovines. Willow’s dad “Hydrangea Bovine,” performed in Vancouver in the ‘80s. She says she was too young to see them perform, but the Queens used to take her sister shopping. “My sister had really big feet so they took her shoe shopping so they could buy stilettos.”

Neil Whaley tells me he still remembers the first time he collected, it was 16 years ago and it was a vintage glass Christmas parasol wrapped in wire that cost about $40.

“I was sitting on a bus in San Francisco, my heart was pounding with excitement,” he says. “it was a real adrenaline rush.” The buzz didn’t last though. Neil has since swapped Christmas ornaments for Vancouver items like the 1920s beach umbrella that says “Read the Daily Province,” pictured below.

“Yesterday I met this guy who collects bras,” Viviane tells me. “It took me back a little bit, but now I’m thinking how would I display a hundred bras? We could do the history of fashion through bras.”

I can’t wait for the next one.

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