It proves quite surreal to repeat the same story over and over. One gains a strange confidence and perfunctoriness in this repetition. By repeating the same story about my art repeatedly, I became both more confident in my story, more exacting in my telling it, and seem to have forgotten what I was saying, while at the same time never forgetting it.
I noticed three types of fair-goers: the first were the ones that were more immersed in their thoughts and activities, that they paid very little attention to the contents of the booths which they were passing. There were few of these, but some did manage to pass by. The second group moved more slowly and deliberately down the aisle, their bodies facing forward while their faces were turned toward the booths. They rarely made eye contact unless greeted with a "Hello" and most often after that continued to navigate down the aisle, never stopping, eyes searching the booth until they passed the threshold of the next and repeated the procedure until something caught their attention.
The third group of people were the ones with which we had the most success. They were similar to the second in their metered gait, but they often walked straight up to the both, their heads and bodies facing the booth. They would examine the work from afar and pause, as if waiting for a cue to engage.
Either my assistant or I would then greet the prospects and then after a moment, when we felt confident that more information would be welcome, said the following:
"The works that you're looking at are actually text."
At this point, every person who had expressed some semblance of interest showed a visible intensification of curiosity. It was almost as if a light had switched on, somewhere in their confidence. I must admit that this was highly gratifying; the notion that something that I created could generate this level of fascination. I continued the story:
"All of the visuals you see in the artwork are the exact same text as in the passages that are pinned beneath them. I have created a new way of writing Latin alphabet-based languages that I call 'Englyph,' and all of these works were created using that writing system. I created a unique set of fonts and a method for organizing the letters and words that takes something that we know quite well and makes it abstract, once again, but still readable, using the rules that I have devised."
"I called this show 'Primary, Black and White' because I limited my color palette to the primary colors, red, blue and yellow, as well as black and white. The text comes from the book, The Primary Colors, by Alexander Theroux."
Eventually, this spiel resulted in sales, of which I am very proud. Onwards and upwards.
