Last spring I was heading to Manhattan for the weekend and popped open the New Yorker to see if anything in the galleries captured my interest. I read about Jenny Perlin’s little show on the Upper East Side and put it on my list. I recall that what hooked me was the word “receipt.”
Receipt art!
“Consider the conundrum of an airport Sbarro pizza joint printing “Please exercise regularly!” on its cash-register receipts. Such are the pleasures proffered by the pencil drawings and 16-mm. animations in Jenny Perlin’s “Flight,” which reproduce, at an enlarged scale, receipts collected while travelling.“ — New Yorker, April 21, 2008.
From Danica Phelps to Dorothy Gambrell, art based on financial transactions has a lot of potential. I like how an LA Times article describes Phelps paintings; I saw some of her work in a show in Boston years ago — series of delicate green and red stripes representing financial loss and gain throughout daily debt and earnings.
“Phelps manages to be self-reflective without lapsing into self-indulgence. She keeps the emotional tone of her work understated, but its intimacy and modesty pull us in close. Marking by hand the record of every dollar earned or spent, the chronicle of every day, implies movement through the world at a pace born of attention to the significance of small acts.“ — LA Times, May 5, 2006.
Phelps is represented by Judi Rotenberg.
Gambrell, on the other hand, maintains a personal blog in comic form, based on money spent on groceries, beers, and transportation (and donated by her readers). There are several levels of detachment here, making the anecdotes all the more affecting when a moment cuts through the layers that separate the messiness of life and the crisp containment of life in internet comic form, as in the entry for 06.16.06.
Jenny Perlin (represented by Mireille Mosler Ltd.) has made an unexpectedly stunning short film in Flight. It is a simple series of looped animations in which line drawings emerge one after the other, documenting receipts from airports all over the world. Timestamps tell a story (certainly with a deadpan neutrality) of travel and grab-and-go fast food consumption. It is interesting how much one can learn (both accurate and misleading) from a pocketful of receipts. Relatively little information is really communicated, though her travels are compelling in how far-flung they seem to be. Ultimately the piece cracks a smile only occasionally, as with the quirky Sbarro exercise remark. Otherwise it is just information, but with a beguiling flicker of life.
I particularly just couldn’t get enough of the human element of the pencil line recreating the stilted receipt-printer letters and numbers, playfully animated, and given additional texture through the flicker of light and sputtering filmgrain.
These artists start with mundane transactions and filter them into personal statements of varying levels of revelation. The transaction continually repeats itself.