We Buy Gold Installation Hämeenkyrö, Finland
While at Arteles Creative Center in Finland, I chose to focus on synthesizing language, political borders, and physical signs of economic disparity. The collision of my immediate environment in Finland and memory of a past landscape became the crux of my “We Buy Gold” project. My memories of the landscape in West Tennessee prior to arriving at Arteles were of a landscape populated with public signage advertising quick but dangerous modes of acquiring “fast-cash”, using the lure of alleviating personal economic doom. This sad medley of both public and private humiliation, desperation, and personal doom is present in the advertisements which heavily populate the West Tennessee landscape. Being immersed in a new language (Finnish), I found myself dependent on signage, and was therefore reminded of my most recent point reference in this medium: signs reading “We Buy Gold”, “Fast Cash”, “Cash4You”, “Fast Loans”, etc. I am interested in the immediacy of this public language and its promise to remedy personal problems. I decided to physically place this language within my immediate environment in Finland, where I could not understand the language, in an attempt to isolate, dislocate, and reinterpret the signage of West Tennessee.