Three B.C. creatives are hoping to bring something new to Vancouver with the first annual CollabWest, an art auction in support of a local men’s mental health charity.
Keith Stride has worked in advertising for decades and also creates large-scale multimedia artworks inspired by pop culture. He needed a push to get his art out there though. “I’ve pursued some artistic endeavours, and I got to a point where my wife basically said, ‘You’ve got to start marketing some of the stuff,” he says. “What better way than to team up with two of my most talented friends and do a joint collaborative event?”
Those friends were Carson Ting (also known as Chairman Ting, the name of his art and design studio) and Conrad Clemiss, a partner at the North Vancouver woodworking studio Reduxwood West. Ting has his hands in everything from illustrations, brand designs, murals, and children’s animation. Clemiss, who has known Stride since 1986, works with his team making handcrafted furniture and art pieces from rare and exotic woods sourced from unlikely places including the bottom of the Panama Canal.
It wasn’t hard to bring the group together. The connections were there, and everyone wanted the chance to work on a shared project. “I think it was probably about 15 years since Keith and I had been in contact,” Clemiss says. “I started seeing what he was doing on Instagram and organically just started following him.”
“Low Glow” by Reduxwood West and Carson Ting.
That modest idea quickly grew into CollabWest, a celebration of creative collaboration and a showcase of three original pieces, which are placed on silent auction in the leadup to the event.
In the spirit of broader, social collaboration, the proceeds of the auction will be donated to a charitable organization. After searching for a suitable cause to support, the CollabWest team landed on HeadsUpGuys, a public education initiative operating out of UBC to share information about men’s mental health through research, evidence-based resources, and community education. “It is a very underfunded area of mental health—men’s mental health specifically,” Stride says.
Like almost everything about CollabWest, the supported charity will change with each new, yearly event. Each one will be headlined by a new set of artist collaborators, “bringing new blood to the table every year,” says Stride, who will stay on with Ting and Clemiss as something akin to founding board members, as the entire event shifts and evolves under new creative leadership.
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“The guest list would always be changing, the art would always be changing, the theme would always be changing, the location—everything except for the name and the spirit, which would remain intact, going forward,” Stride says. “We wanted to have an event that could sort of reinvent itself for years to come.”
Among the inaugural collection is a triptych, with Ting painting on salvaged Toronto Transit Commission signage that Stride purchased from a retired bus driver in North Vancouver.
“It was from an old 1940s bus scroll or a streetcar scroll from Toronto,” Stride explains. “I was like, what the hell am I gonna do with this? So I ended up cutting it into three pieces and made these three side-by-side boards, and then I was like, oh well, that’s cool. Now what do I do with that? That was before we even started talking about this collab, and then as soon as we got into it, I showed them to Carson.”
A close up of “Shadow and Grain” by Reduxwood West and Keith Stride.
“It’s a cool piece,” says Ting, who added his own illustrations to the boards. “An homage to the TTC, my hometown, and so that’s the main piece I’m really excited about.”
Each piece up for auction brings together the artists’ styles in various ways, combining woodwork, illustration, and nostalgic pop art into bold multimedia paintings and sculptures.
While CollabWest is only in its inaugural year, its creators have high hopes that it will grow into something unlike anything else in the city. “The idea, the bigger picture is to create something with a bit of a lasting legacy behind it that will go forward after this year and after we do our event” Stride says.
“The vision down the road is kind of the Met Gala of Vancouver,” Clemiss adds.
CollabWest takes place at the Reduxwood studio in North Vancouver October 18. Bidding takes place online, and limited tickets are available to the public.
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