Contact (2002)
vinyl wall text, acrylic business card holders, offset printed cards

Contact was produced for the exhibition Pretending to Pretend at the Soap Factory. The artists were asked to take the Soap Factory, a non-profit, community-based art institution, as a subject. I wrote a wall text welcoming viewers to the space and encouraging them to contact those involved in the exhibition and installed the text at the entrance to the galleries. I facilitated contact by producing a series of cards providing extensive contact information for all of the artists in the exhibition and for each member of the administrative staff and board of directors at the Soap Factory. The cards were mounted in a series of commercial business card holders underneath the vinyl wall text. Each card gave, along with the subject's name, their function within the exhibition, their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, and their preferred mode of contact. I worked with the Soap Factory's designer so the materials were produced with the Soap Factory's font face and were in keeping with the Soap Factory's visual identity. At the opening reception artists and administrators used the cards to encourage those that they met to keep in contact, and throughout the exhibition the cards were replenished as they were removed by viewers. The artists and staff committed to answering telephone or e-mail inquiries generated from the project, but many viewers who did recognize the work as one of the pieces in the exhibition assumed that the contact information given was incorrect or that callers would be connected to performers rather than the actual artists and staff listed. Most viewers believed the work to be new signage and business cards placed in the galleries by the administrative staff at the Soap Factory, and many of those viewers simply took cards in order to contact artists or staff with questions and comments.