Curated Castoffs

We went to a great little event the other night at Patrick Gordon Framing. It was called Curated Castoffs: Art & Decor Edition. It was kind of like a collaborative garage sale where everything’s free.

It works like this: At 7:00 pm everybody shows up with five art + decor items for swapping: prints, paintings, mirrors, frames, wall hangings, fabric, ceramics, pillows, lamps, taxidermy heads, etc. No junk. You pay a cover charge of $8, turn over your items, and spend the next hour or so drinking wine, enjoying the tunes, socializing and checking out what everybody else brought. Then at the appointed time, there’s a big friendly free-for-all, and everybody gets to take whatever they like, provided they grab it before anyone else does.

Our five cast-offs included a dry-mounted 1998 Bluesfest poster, an abstract oil painting in yellows that I bought at Southworks, a mixed-media canvas by Gwendolyn Best that I bought at Everybody’s Art Show, a stained glass piece that hangs in a window somehow but I could never figure out how, and a painting of a sunflower. These were all pieces that I liked over the years, but I’ve since run out of wall space and it was time to let them go.

I spotted a Dan Martelock piece that I really, really, really wanted, as did several other people. It was in the middle of a table where I couldn’t reach it easily, so the long-armed GC stationed himself right next to it and pounced on it as soon as the free-for-all started.

Meanwhile, the woman next to us pounced on the mixed media piece that I’d brought, and seemed surprised that we hadn’t wrestled her for it. “I thought you guys wanted it too,” she said, “Since you were standing beside it for the last 15 minutes.” We explained that we had been staking out the Martelock piece next to it. She loved the mixed media piece, and it gave me great pleasure to see it go to a new home where it would be appreciated.

We also picked up a framed giraffe batik for my giraffe-collecting son, and a puppet for my puppet-collecting boyfriend.

Anything that was left over was donated to Highjinx, which is a trippy little second-hand shop in Chinatown that uses its profits to help homeless people get off the street. So it was a win-win-win situation all round.

I love the Curated Cast-offs concept and it seemed to work well too. People were civilized and there was no blood shed, although if anybody had challenged a certain young woman for the taxidermy deer head, there might have been.

Taxidermy is one of those things that is kind of awful and cool at the same time. I can’t decide whether it’s more awful or more cool.

About 10 years ago I was a guest at a party on Georgian Bay. A second party splintered off from the main party when a handful of us got in a boat and zoomed off to someone else’s “cottage” for a couple of hours. This splinter party was held by a nouveau riche couple who had tons of money and extraordinarily bad taste. They were loud and crass and they took tackiness to bold new heights. The decorating theme for their house was Dead Animals. They had heads mounted everywhere: moose, zebras, antelope, all kinds of animals. They had a real bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, and they bragged about how often they had sex on it. It was an awesomely awful party.

Anyway, ever since then I can’t see a taxidermy head without thinking of them. But I think the girl who got the deer head the other night will be able to pull it off better than they did.