Combine

On Sunday I drove to North Vancouver to attend the second day of Combine, an art fair organized by four Vancouver-based private art galleries (Franc, Monica Reyes, Unit 17 and Wil Aballe) and housed at Griffin Art Projects, a flexible space whose mandate includes the exhibition and discussion of artworks held in private collections, in addition to artist residencies, talks and whatever else can be imagined in the name of contemporary art.

After viewing the exhibition I returned home to listen-in on a ZOOM discussion involving the galleries' principals. During the discussion someone brought up the example of the Seattle Art Fair, which began robustly in 2015, due in large part to a Seattle-based collector who used his influence to pull in some of the U.S.'s leading contemporary galleries.

The first Seattle fair was impressive in terms of participating galleries, artists, curators and the many events and activities they took part in, and one wondered how much this commissioning collector was willing to spend to keep it that way. Turns out not enough, because the fair lost steam after a couple of years, and once COVID hit, it went on hiatus, though it intends to return in July 2022.

Vancouver's cultural ecology is not immune to the kind of top-down development that gave us the Seattle Art Fair. An example can be found in the city's leading cultural institution -- the Vancouver Art Gallery -- and its twenty-year mission to move to a new location and build a purpose-built structure that, as it turns out, is no longer the stand alone edifice its former director insisted on, but an anchor in a Centre named after one of its donors. The VAG's latest donor, who recently donated 2.5 times what the naming donor provided, is the author of the VAG's top-down approach, a philosophy that begins with politicians, not the people who vote them into office. 

For me, Combine is taking the right approach to developing an art fair, one built by its participating galleries from the ground-up. Granted, this way takes longer, but it is to my mind the only way to make anything anymore -- allowing people of all walks to have a hand in the placement of its bricks and mortar, feel part of that which is growing, as one feels when one sprouts a seed on a window sill in February and replants it in the garden in April, enjoying it throughout May and June, before picking one of its flowers in July and pressing it in a book until November, when it is taken out and twirled by its stem, put in an envelope and sent to a friend. 

*Untitled poster by Robert Kleyn courtesy of Monica Reyes Gallery