Vendor is a hard piece to explain.
We created a street vending cart, invented some people to operate it, made a product for them to sell and then did that out on the night streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We sold little people for big people to eat, made of Rice Krispy Treats.
The original idea came from a small scene in the movie “Bladerunner” where the hero is getting his dinner in an exotic night market in a dim and chaotic urban alley. It was an Asian noodle stand and the atmosphere was definitely post-something or other. There was the mix of dissimilar cultures we see more of now, exotic rural and nomadic peoples from the southern and eastern hemispheres grabbing footholds in a cosmopolitan distopia.
Vendor then became an installation in the Brooklyn Museum Open House show. It included 5 channels of video recorded from the street performances on 10 monitors, and we replaced the Krispy Treats with wooden dolls.
Vendor was a collaborative project by
Ward Shelley, Caroline Cox, Tim Spelios, Doug Paulson, Asha Ganpat, Mike Seybold, Jessica Williams, Kate Gilmore.
Special thanks to Cam Gainer, Jenny Lynn McNutt, Jim Torok, Ianthe Jackson, and Gregory Barsamian.
