Sometimes stuff, even if it’s really cool stuff, can just be too much stuff. Some people are OK with the monthly cost of storage lockers to store their excess; others, on the extreme side of things, go for mountainous stacks in their homes that result in horrifying pathways that lead from one room to the other.
And others still, just know when it’s OK to let stuff go.
Erin Gibbs had a table set up with part of her eclectic vintage collection at Hot Art Wet City art gallery for the first ever Main Street Flea this past weekend. Everything with a price tag was something she owned, and had collected, for the simple reason she liked it at one time or another. That was obvious with the care she took in displaying her wares so the table resembled more a permanent display for a high-end home store than a market sale. It made perfect sense upon learning Gibbs works as a surface designer for Danica Studio (some of her designs have shown up at Anthropologie and Crate & Barrel).
“It’s harder to get rid of some things than others,” Gibbs said. “I’ve got some vintage needle packs in there from an old family friend who passed away. I have other ones at home but still, it’s hard to get rid of them. I’ve got a washboard in there, don’t use it, don’t need it in the house. Those old fondue pots — they’re so beautiful — I thought it would be really cool to drill a hole in them and hang them, have an air plant hanging out.”
Home is a two-bedroom condo she shares with husband Chris Bentzen, owner of Hot Art Wet City who had his own collection of stuff for sale in the Main Street Flea that included beer-making supplies (“Been a few years since I made beer,” he said.); trophies he won in 1985 as a baseball and soccer player (“The only reason I kept them was because I was going to turn them into something.”); and three huge bins of Playboy magazines that had once belonged to his dad (“I have fond memories of sneaking a peak at them when I was a kid.”)
Gibbs and Bentzen agreed stability is conducive to collecting.
“I moved to Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»in ’96 to go to art school and when you’re in your 20s you move around every year, move home for the summer, so you don’t have a ton of stuff,” Gibbs said. “But once I finished school, I started hoarding.”
It was vintage labels from canned goods that first caught Gibbs’ design eye. She was a student in between semesters at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design when she spotted the “My Choice” British Columbia keta salmon and Wardour asparagus spears tin can labels laying in a box at the fruit stand she worked at, evidently untouched, judging by their perfect condition, for the better part of 30 years.
“That was probably the turning point,” she said.
Also for sale was a basket full of Canadian yarn, a lovely mint green Pyrex dish, a set of unopened markers from Eaton’s from a great aunt who has since been moved into a care home, a metal first aid kit filled with vintage postcards, and butterfly and bug specimens in shadow boxes that Gibbs’ mom came across in her hometown of Summerland, B.C.
Gibbs first visits to the thrift store were reluctant ones as she and her sister shopped for used clothing during their elementary school years out of financial necessity. She remembers going through racks at the second-hand store rather disdainfully during the 1980s, knowing full well she wouldn’t find anything comparable to the Club Monaco sweatshirts, Benetton shirts, and slouchy socks the other kids were wearing. But by the time thrift store-sourced grunge became trendy in the 1990s, Gibbs was old hat at finding the good stuff.
Even at the flea market, she wore $200 Raleigh Denim Workshop jeans she bought for $8.99 at the East Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Salvation Army — once again proving one person’s junk is another’s treasure.
Appropriate, too, the little market was held concurrently with RECEIPT, an exhibition at Hot Art Wet City where the works of local artists were priced by way of restaurant receipts where the idea is to playfully question those who claim they cannot afford art, but then drop a few hundred dollars on a night out.
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