SEVEN ELEVEN SHOOT
SEVEN ELEVEN SHOOT is an installation of 30 small-format color photographs of a 7-11 sign in Chicago. I shot at the sign with my cell phone camera while riding the El to and from work over the course of a year. In the gallery the images were displayed in sequence, butted together in a single long line that wrapped around one corner of the room. These photographs are meant to be vestiges of a daily routine, a study of the relationship between repetition (mass commerce, commuter routines) and dissonant individual experience. It is my attempt to reframe these relationships by taking tiny potshots at a ubiquitous sign, a monument to middle America.
-Susan Greenspan
"Tip of the Week, Susan Greenspan at NOVA," New City Chicago review
Susan Greenspan has a thing for 7-Eleven signs, which she shoots from above and below, frontally and at angles, and in their full glory and radically cropped or blurred into illegibility at night, all in the context of the Chicago streets that they grace. In Greenspan's soft miniature color cityscapes--taken with a cell-phone camera--the heralds of Big Gulps to come are obtrusive intruders on otherwise nondescript streets, dominating their environments brashly and monotonously. Seeing so many of the same signs--even when their presentation is studiously varied--deprives them of any seductive power that they might once have had, leaving the sense that they should fade into their surroundings, which we know that they never can do. The photographic miniature normally invites us into a world that our gaze can dominate; here the sign looks back at us and pokes us in the eye.
-Michael Weinstein