This season of gift-giving, the awkward, the unwanted and the inappropriate are being saved from the garbage heap by four young artists who’ve just opened the Museum of Bad Gifts at a gallery on Roncesvalles Ave.
Stephanie Avery, Shari Kasman, Martin Reis, and Sean Martindale came up with the idea, as a tongue-in-cheek way of answering the nagging question that comes up every year at this time: what to do with the stuff we never asked for, given by a person we never liked, that now sits in a dark corner, never to be seen again?
Their answer: Hang it on a wall, and let the public enjoy.
“A bad gift is different for everyone — it’s a subjective thing,” says Kasman. “One person’s bad gift is another person’s gem.”
Kasman said she and her collaborators were trying to decide recently what to do with their Roncesvalles Avenue gallery space and decided to dedicate it to something everyone appreciates about this time of year: gift-giving.
Their twist? Dedicate to the space to the anti-gift, or, “the emotional and cultural clutter left in the wake of obligatory gift-giving, the feelings of disconnection, and the strange allure of unwanted items,” as the group says in a media statement.Â
“The museum explores the rituals of giving and receiving and the discomfort of ‘stuff’Â we never asked for.”
Kasman says her group put out the word to friends and colleagues to find the worst of the bad gifts they’d received over the years.
Some were loaned, some simply given to the gallery. Others were used as inspiration for local artists who’ve attempted to take those old lumps of coal and transform them into true art forms.
Curating the museum was not easy though, Kasman says.
“One issue is people often will throw these things out,” she said. “And then there’s this element of ‘will the person who gave this to me find out that it’s here?’
“Certain people said to me it’s okay that it’s in the show because the person who gave it to me is dead.”
The result is a truly eclectic collection, including:
- A spotted rubber hippo that quacks like a duck.
- A wine bottle made from a horse’s hoof.
- A cookbook for one, presented to a newlywed.
And for those visitors who want to take part but have tossed out their own worst gift, Kasman says the exhibition will be interactive, with a station that allows people to draw a hated gift from memory, and then hang it on the wall.
Another station, the Imaginarium, provides crafting supplies to visitors who’ve brought their own nightmare gifts, which can then be used to re-think and hopefully improve upon the original gift.
That’s what sculptor and gallery visitor Andy Fischer did. Her own worst gift was a Cabbage Patch doll that a “friend” had re-built using freakish found parts and given to her.
The Frankensteinish monstrosity, tastefully re-framed, now hangs in the museum.
“There are bad gifts that are so bad they’re good,” Fischer says. “Those are the ones I enjoy the most.”
Kasman acknowledges that some might see her “museum” as ungrateful. But that’s an idea she rejects.
“It’s all in good fun,” she says.
In the end, the exhibits will all be auctioned off, with the proceeds going to the Daily Bread Food Bank, “so that bad gift might have a nice home and a nice outcome,” she says.
The Museum of Bad Gifts opens on Dec. 26 and runs til Jan. 5 at the Northern Gallery, 420 Roncesvalles Ave.
