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If you’re not a professional artist—which, let’s face it, most of us aren’t—you might not know a lot about art collectors. While some, like Michael Audain of Audain Art Museum fame, have put their names and faces out there, others are more reclusive. And so, it makes sense that it takes a photographer turning his lens on collectors to bring them into the foreground.
For lens-based artist Christos Dikeakos, collecting has long been a fascination of his, first sparked by clandestine childhood trips to the Museum of Vancouver (when it was still housed in the Carnegie Community Centre) with a friend.
“Monday was the day it was closed. We knocked on the back alley door, and we would be admitted for half an hour to have a look at the collections—everything from stuffed horned owls to argillite to whatever,” Dikeakos recalls over a video call. “I loved exploring and how collections look back at me.”
That interest has been a mainstay of the photographer’s work for over 40 years, and his new exhibition, The Collectors, serves as something of a retrospective of Dikeakos’ work. The show, which opens on September 20 at Griffin Art Projects, comprises portraits of collectors of all kinds of varieties: from wealthy philanthropists hoarding art in storage units to community organizations archiving historic curios.
The images heavily reference classical artworks: consider a 17th-century work like Teniers the Younger’s The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Painting Gallery in Brussels, which depicts the governor of the Netherlands in front of an alcove, the walls completely covered in Renaissance paintings, and stacks more canvases visible in the foreground.
“I studied art history for many years at university, so I got really used to looking—especially in this case, at Dutch Renaissance art—where they excelled in showing the exuberant, the lively, the psychological, the candid,” Dikeakos muses. “I can’t help but kind of refer back to things that more well-known and accomplished artists had done previously.”
It’s easy to draw a line from that to something like Uno Langmann Limited Fine Art, Dikeakos’ portrait of the owner of a South Granville fine arts dealership. Langmann sits staring into the camera below a huge chandelier, with gold-framed worked covering the walls behind him; but, in a play of double exposure, he also appears in the background, inspecting a portrait that looks distinctly 18th-century.
“You can really feel it solidly coming from these traditions, but then entering the digital realm,” says Lisa Baldissera, Griffin Arts Projects director and curator of The Collectors. “These kinds of interventions give it a quality that is almost more real than the real. It feels like [Dikeakos] is adding in layers that allow us to see several iterations at the same time.”
The portraits tend toward the maximalist: carefully arranged items surrounding a person, with the objects in question cluing the viewer in on the subject’s life. In Hastings Mill Store Museum, nine women sit and stand around a table, drinking tea from willow-patterned cups, surrounded by glass cases of labelled wares as First Nations art spills onto the surface.
“The Hastings Mill Store Museum really interested me, because you go in and everything has remained the same as when it was collected, and it seems there’s no real taxonomy,” Dikeakos says. “It’s like you fall into a rabbit hole: your imagination takes over.”
Part of the intrigue of looking at connoisseurs with their vast amounts of art is trying to understand the scale of their holdings. The items in the portraits are only the tip of the iceberg, and, similarly, the exhibition itself serves as a way to begin to comprehend the importance of collectors in the fine art economy and how purchasing art can mirror the patronage systems of European nobility.
The question of ownership is especially resonant in B.C., where the earliest formal art and museum collectors were settlers acquiring First Nations works—often through theft. Dikeakos’ work does not offer easy answers to questions of repatriation or restitution, but rather considers what drives people to want to possess art.
“Once, when we did have First Nations auctions, we no longer have those,” Dikeakos says. “In terms of how those collections are collected and then again dispersed, the circulation of desire… this constant kind of wanting to collect, that really interested me.”
The Collectors also speaks to the circular nature of art: as objects that can pass between public and private collections, that can be on show or hidden, and that ultimately live on beyond any single person.
“There’s a line of resurgence and continuity that runs through all of these objects,” Baldissera adds. “They are a continuum, and they will have a life before and after these collectors as well.”
The Collectors runs from September 20 to December 14 at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver. A series of films and talks will also take place as part of the exhibition.
