November 3 – December 10, 2014
Artist’s reception: Friday November 21st 7-9pm
Everyday… is the shopkeeper’s practiced platitudes framed in gilded typeface positioned against ellipses and scattered rhythmic cadences seared on thermal receipt paper. As a register of bygone alacrity, Everyday… points to that enthusiasm as a now required part of the customer service dictum.
Sourced from retail transaction records the text works are rendered by the practiced hand of a sign-painter. Painted on glass the words hover above blank backgrounds as if waiting for an appropriate cue in the conversational commonality of retail interaction. The gold, silver, and bronze (copper) gilding suggests rank, one’s place on the consumer podium, or merely the expected measure of trained clerks. Intersecting the framed texts are patterns and dots of varying sizes on strips of thermal receipt paper. As ephemeral records, these mark the pace of customer interaction and the idleness of retail activity punctuated by excruciatingly slow-moving clocks.
Everyday… is about the loss of the handmade and a testament to the psyche of laboring. The handmade is confronted through sign-painting as a skilled, but antiquated trade. Despite being an expected part of customer interaction; emotional labor, and its recognition, has become the equivalent of the handmade —obsolete and unrecognized. It is this contradiction perhaps best highlighted by Dale Carnegie in his influential text: How to Win Friends and Influence People. “An insincere grin? No. That doesn’t fool anybody. We know it is mechanical and we resent it. I am talking about a real smile, a heartwarming smile, a smile that comes from within, the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the marketplace.”
~Bruce Montcombroux – 2014
