Collections and connections explored in Museum of Vancouver exhibit

Last year, the Museum of Vancouver put a call to local collectors, saying "the museum wants to explore the mindset of passionate 'hunters and gatherers' and showcase their favourite pieces."

After looking through hundreds of collections, 20 were chosen, and a new exhibit, "All Together Now: Vancouver Collectors and Their Worlds" will open this week featuring those wide-ranging and sometimes slightly weird collections.

"I've been in the museum biz for a while. I've been collecting collectors, literally," Viviane Gosselin, curator of contemporary culture at the museum told On The Coast's Lisa Christiansen.

"Lots of interesting collectors that I've felt like at one point, we really need to work with these people, they're doing such interesting things."

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"The aim behind [this] is to really talk about the role of collectors as people helping us makeall kinds of connectionsconnectionswith things, with ideas and with other people."

The collections at the exhibit are wide-ranging. There are antique circus pieces, pinball equipment and even a massive collection of Chinese food menus over the years.

"Through those mundane documents you can actually see the history of food and the history of transnational culture," Gosselin said of the menus, which feature ever-changing items through the years.

One collection, consisting of thousands of action figures from films like Star Wars, the Smurfs and more, took museum staff more thantwo days to install.

"It's a memory trigger; a lot of people remember playing with those," Gosselin said. "You have these conversations taking place between these people who don't even know each other, so that's the great thing about collections. It's a conversation piece."

"All Together Now: Vancouver Collectors and Their Worlds" opens Thursday and runs until January.

With files from CBC Radio One's On The Coast