Permanent Collection

I’ve always been fascinated by objects, and from as far back as I can remember I’ve had a particularly hard time letting them go. From items of clothing I used to love wearing, to the leftover food wrappers I can’t quite place my sentimentality for: trying to hold these objects forever is something instinctive and familiar to me.

I saw Care and Wear and Like everything alive that we try to hold forever when they were on view at Esker Foundation in 2023. Experiencing these exhibitions, and revisiting them as part of this writing, has happened to coincide with a time in my life where I’m working more than ever before towards parting with a large amount of my stuff. Through this process, I’ve gone through boxes upon boxes, recycled huge amounts of paper, donated clothes, and revisited old collections. I’ve often sorted objects into “yes” piles, only to revisit these weeks later and forget why I wanted to keep them in the first place.

I find this process immensely difficult. I know that having a hard time with this isn’t uncommon, but my experience with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder makes each decision about what I ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ get rid of particularly challenging. Yet these experiences have also shaped my deep interest in material culture. In particular, the reasons we choose to accumulate and collect – from love and admiration, to comfort, care, and even anxiety.

At a peer support group for people who struggle with and want to start letting go of objects they’ve acquired, I’m given a resource which outlines a list of some common meanings that people might attach to their objects. I’m asked to reflect upon the ways I assign meaning to objects in my life, and in doing so, I start to wonder what connections and differences may exist between my own desire to collect or hoard¹, and the impulse to acquire and preserve that exists in museums and collections.

The objects stored in bankers boxes and shelving units may only be things that we’re drawn to in a material sense, but it’s not only objects we try to hold forever, it’s the ideas they represent.

In Care and Wear: Bodies Crafted for Harm and Healing, Brendan Griebel and Jude Griebel curated a selection of objects from their wider collection in The Museum of Fear and Wonder. This collection began from their shared artistic and anthropological research practices, stemming from craftwork and “pieces that had a certain emotional and psychological resonance.”³

In their company, you can almost feel these objects’ histories. Many of the pieces have been heavily worn down through the intensity of their uses as crash test dummies, children’s toys, or as medical training models. In each of these contexts, all operate as stand-ins or “surrogates” for human bodies.

Many of these objects were envisioned and created as tools for teaching care and empathy, particularly the medical models used in instructing healthcare professionals, and the dolls created for children to look after. With this in mind, it’s important to recognise how the design of these objects depicting human bodies reflect some upsetting biases that the collectors are well aware of and aimed to highlight in the context of a gallery space.⁴ Looking around the room, I notice a whiteness that is reflected in many of the figure’s complexions – even when the pale-pink paint on the head of a Buschow & Beck Minerva Doll has chipped, exposing the pressed sheet-metal below. This reflects just one of many concerns that can come up when using only certain types of crafted bodies: who many of these figures are modelled after and how they were modelled informs who they encourage empathy towards.

Another example of problematic bias is a crash test dummy on display that, similar to many of its time, was modelled using the proportions of a male body determined to be average.⁵ Crash testing based on these proportions was once considered standard, but as one might anticipate, basing motor vehicle testing on only this type of body produces vehicles that are not designed to protect other riders: women, children, those with disabilities, and really everyone whose body exists outside this one-size idea of “average.”

Ideas of what bodies are considered “average” are pervasive. From clothing sizes to public architecture, calculated averages are manufactured by human choice. These choices include everything from which objects we collect, the material used to make these objects, and the conclusions we draw from material collections. As part of Like everything alive we try to hold forever, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s video work Dust to Data (2021), poetically interrogates the way that the study of collected historical objects has led to the preservation of much more than just the material itself. For instance, British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie made a deliberate choice to associate skull size with race and intelligence in his research and used this fundamentally incorrect and racist “evidence” to justify practices of eugenics. Even if data itself is not always a tactile material, it is rendered immensely real and physical in the way it can be used: through racist and colonial violence.

As Achiampong & Blandy recognise, these methods are “both historical, and very contemporary.”⁶ The ongoing intersection between racism and museum collections is also considered through Sondra Perry’s IT’S IN THE GAME ’17, which recalls the way Perry’s brother had not consented to the use of his image being sold for use in EA’s NCAA Basketball video game series. Alongside footage of her family visiting museums, Perry’s work emphasises that the appropriation of Black people’s likeness, and the exploitation of Black labour, is a violence pervasive in all institutions.

We craft objects informed by our ideas, and we also collect them this way; moulding and upholding them into shapes that are inseparable from both human bodies and human systems. With this in mind, there’s an aspect of control that exists in the attempt to keep and preserve these things.

Achiampong and Blandy read aloud the words “You’re terrified that if the understandings change, everything will fall apart,”⁷ and I notice an unsettling feeling in my stomach. Even though I know that the circumstances of my personal interests and collections are something immensely different than the systemic violence Dust to Data responds to, I feel deeply uncomfortable when I begin to consider this in relation to my own fears and anxieties surrounding change.

When I was doing my BFA, I started a collection of Calgary Transit tickets and bus transfers that played a large part in my art practice at the time. I love trains and feel grateful that I live in the vicinity of, and can easily access, a public transit system. I also just enjoy the routine of hopping on the train to work or gazing out the window on a long bus ride.

In a material sense, I collect transit tickets because I’m curious about their graphic design, their role as objects I encounter every day, and those that are timestamped. I also appreciate how fragile they are. Susceptible to the forces of both inclement weather and pocket-lint, Calgary Transit’s bus transfers are made up of a newsprint that breaks down from my fidgeting oily fingertips and sweaty palms.

It may be because of my affinity for these objects that I find it tempting to use their fragility as a metaphor for the ways that human structures break down by way of the dirty organic matter that builds life on this planet. Maybe there is some truth to this, and I’ve certainly said this before. When considering the way these tickets are used, however, I’m unsure if it’s responsible to idealise them in this way. In doing so, I run the risk of promoting systems I feel apprehensive towards. After all, when the bus transfer has crumbled, or when caught in the absence of a train ticket, transit riders are subject to punishment, which in turn can be construed to encourage more policing and surveillance in these spaces.

I had an interesting moment this summer where this personal collection of mine and its relationship to the museum met head-to-head. I visited the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn and loved it – feeling giddy with excitement during the whole experience. While there, I happened upon a display of coin “slugs” that New York City transit riders had crafted as fakes to avoid paying subway fares. Enclosed in a display behind plexiglass, these ‘faux fares’ felt like a reminder of the ways people use craft to disrupt systems used to prevent access to public services. But I also became aware of the irony of this thought in realising I was experiencing it in a museum I paid to enter, and as I realised that in this context, the slugs were presented as evidence. Nearby signage reads “Fare evasion is a crime” and the next displays in the museum go on to describe upgrades to subway turnstiles and payment methods designed to make avoiding these fares more difficult.

Objects are not neutral, and neither are their collections.

With this in mind, my ideas about public transit start to disintegrate, alongside (and perhaps because of) the ticket itself. On trying to hold forever: I still have a box of train tickets and bus transfers, and continue to love collecting them, especially when gifted to me by close friends, or when one lays slick to the sidewalk on a rainy day.

In writing this so far, I’ve outlined many reasons I believe it’s important to think critically about the sorts of things we collect and preserve. Yet this isn’t always the way I relate to the clothing, books, and paper material I surround myself with.

I look towards Miya Turnbull’s self-portraiture, where she uses folded photographs of her face to make origami, or layers of papier mache to craft masks. Informed by the childhood memory of her mother teaching her how to fold, Turnbull uses these pieces to reflect upon intergenerational knowledge and Japanese-Canadian heritage. The work is small and has an energetic presence. While I wouldn’t hold these sculptures in my hands in the gallery context, their relationship to the body and delicate craft makes me imagine the ways one would go about holding them.

Another relationship to paper that I hold, is in the connection I feel while holding the aged zines and ephemera reflecting local queer history. I feel so grateful these objects have been collected and preserved as part of queer history projects, and it wouldn’t have begun without individual decisions to keep these objects and recognise their importance. There is always more to our stories than can ever be stored in folders and bankers boxes, but accessing archival collections, reading Kevin Allen’s Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary, and especially hearing these stories told in person, is a privilege and a gift.

I’m deeply fond of the way Diane Borsato engages with objects in museum collections through her work. In part, I think this is because of my desire to interact with these objects in a largely sensory and embodied way. Of course, Borsato’s body of work uses these embodied gestures in ways that subvert the authority of institutions such as museums. Through the physical and sensual interactions that Borsato and her collaborators enact, they disrupt the rules of engagement in these spaces. Museums are institutions that, through the guise of preservation, make decisions about the objects they have collected–oftentimes through colonial projects and resource extraction.

Alongside this disruption, Borsato names a “privileged access” she has experienced as an artist, which has unlocked doors and given her permission to interact with collections materials in ways not allowed by most visitors to these spaces. So many people desire to interact with objects in a tactile way. I think of how often, in my experiences as a gallery attendant, I asked viewers to stop touching the silky garments and texture-rich sculptures on display. There’s such a playfulness to this way of interacting with the world (I write as I remember the time my sister and I got in trouble as toddlers for climbing on a Rodin sculpture).

There is a necessary comfort in the sensory aspect of objects. I find one of these necessary comforts in the way fibres wear down over time, until a once uncomfortable knit finally feels good to wear against my skin. Even in the precise design of a pamphlet for an art exhibition, or the soft piece of velvet in my back pocket. I feel grounded in the way I play with the bubble popping fidget spinner, which I carry with me most times in preparation for panic attacks.

While I firmly believe these objects are not neutral, there’s a part of me that also wants to acknowledge an unknown: a slippery feeling of being drawn to something, especially when you don’t logically understand why. Some objects just have a kind of energy that, like a magnet, shifts my body and attention towards them.

In both Artifacts in My Mouth and Gems and Minerals, I’m appreciative of the way Borsato balances a tactile curiosity towards objects and their materials in tandem with the poignant critique. An intimate and playful embodiment of all stories that objects are made of, in tandem with the realities that many of these stories are not without harm done. In Artifacts in My Mouth in particular, I’m delighted about the way Borsato’s interaction means that she’s become part of the object’s existence. One microbiome to another in a gesture that’s both shocking and warm. A gesture that empowers change.

It’s the same feeling I got when I moved through Care and Wear, listening to Brendan and Jude Griebel contemplate the way that showcasing visible mending in their collection honours an ongoing relationship to objects and their craftspeople that “exists in time and space.”⁸ Or in My Crops Are Dying But My Body Persists, when Bridget Moser’s muscle bodysuit can no longer keep each of its packing peanuts inside, because she tries to hold it.

I truly love and am grateful for the objects I hold on to. I just hope that an accumulation of objects in a warm affinity doesn’t downplay the systems of violence and colonialism that objects and collections can exist within. Or rather, I hope we collect objects because we love people, preserving community histories that may otherwise be lost. Or simply because the texture is strangely satisfying, and the taste reminds us of another time.

I think that part of the comfort I take in objects has to do with the way they have seemed like a constant at times when everything else was constantly changing. But ultimately, letting go becomes a necessity. Whether my hands grow tired of holding, or the objects can no longer be held, I think that truly caring for something means that you allow it to change, and in the process, accepting that this may change you, too.

But don’t tell that to the dust on my windowsill.

Notes:

^[1] I’ve strayed away from using the term “hoarding” or “hoarder” in this writing for the most part, as it’s a word that I’ve found comes alongside lots of assumptions about what that might look like. But mostly, I’ve found that it brings up a feeling of shame. I don’t think hoarding is shameful.

^[2] This table, as well as each table in this writing, have been loosely adapted from line items in the list, “Common Meanings of Possessions” (page 5), from Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring: Workbook, written by Gail Steketee and Randy Frost, and published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

^[3] Care and Wear Audio: Introduction by Brendan Griebel and Jude Griebel, Esker Foundation 2023

^[4] “Objects Are Never Neutral: Interview With Brendan and Jude Griebel.” Care + Wear: Bodies Crafted For Harm + Healing, Publication, 2023.

^[5] Care and Wear Audio: Crash Test Dummy, Alderson Research Labs, Inc., Esker Foundation 2023

^[6] Video: Dust to data / Larry Achiampong & David Blandy (2:17)

^[7] Video: Dust to data / Larry Achiampong & David Blandy (9:59)

^[8] Brendan Griebel and Jude Griebel, Care and Wear Audio: Painter’s manikin, Esker Foundation 2023