accidental installation 001

So about ten or eleven years ago, when I first joined the Neo-Futurists, there was a dilapidated convenience store at the southwest corner of Clark and Foster, which Diana referred to as "The Shift-E-Mart".

Shifty it was. The front window was papered over with bleached-out posters advertising movies that had been released years prior. A questionable clientele shuffled in and out at all hours. The counter by the register only paid a vague homage to the usual convenience-store stock: A handful of dusty gum and mints that, like the movies touted in the front window, had been released years prior.

The rest of the store's inventory was no better, but one display, visible from the plate-glass windows on the Foster Street side, made for completely accidental political art. One steel-grey shelf was stocked, for the most part, with big boxes of laundry detergent. In the midst of the boxes, however, a neat little space had been cleared, and in the middle of that space, pristine, unmoved, framed on all sides by Gain and Downy and Dreft, was one perfect bottle of Summer's Eve douche.


That bottle of douche stayed there, untouched, week after week, month after month, year after year, until finally the store was shut down (and taken over by a similarly questionable "Vitamin Outlet" which, although it has no such douche displays, sure does have a bizarro inventory of weight-gain powders, astronomically overpriced Pirate's Booty, Tofutti, and sports drinks). Serene in its little niche on the shelf, it couldn't have been more attractively accentuated had Carol Merrill been standing next to it, smiling and gesturing.

How we loved that douche.

In honor of that completely unplanned installation piece I give you the first in a series of accidental art moments. This one comes courtesy of another convenience store which, although it has its questionable moments--who wants to buy produce from a store where the owner chain-smokes at the register?!??--is saved by the unfailing sweetness of its adorable employees, two of whom are the owner's sons.

I would've thought at least one of them would've noticed this by now:


In the immortal words of Sesame Street: One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong.

A HUGE thank you to Chloe for the photo.