Merc Daze
Merc Daze is a painted series that dances on the border between authenticity and artifice of lived experience, through a celebration of fleeting moments, community, and the service industry. The series explores how social media and customer service each function as performance, paralleling the assumed superficiality of service industry staff with rosy-lensed social media curation. Merc Daze is an analog social media feed: a culmination of disparate oil painted moments that together, creates an overall picture of a distinct time and place.
. The time is pre-Covid19, and the place is the Mercury Café: a historic Denver arts and culture establishment that is run by a unique combination of chaos, creativity and community. The ‘Merc’, as it is fondly referred to by employees and regulars, is a cash only, staunchly anti-technology restaurant and venue that encourages community building, connection and human interaction through its screen-free stance.
The Merc exists in a time warp, anomalously untouched by technological advancement of the past 30 years, where moments bleed into each other and an ever-evolving cast of characters feed the changing landscape of community patrons. The references for the works in Merc Daze were acquired from blurry cell-phone photos taken during shifts over the course of my employment at the café, and portray authentic moments of joy and bizarreness that occurred between the staff.
