The Downtown Providence Parks Network (DPNN) is presenting Rhode Island artists as a part of their winter lights Lumina Festival this February and has chosen to allow Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng's appliances to be brought into the park for a centrally located installation. The installation, I Just Work Here, features Ravage, a 55 minute video about the dead end nature of customer service calls, playing through the windows of a discarded washer, dryer, and stove.
Through the title of the installation, which references the marking, remembering, claiming, and identifying of work by saying it out loud, the city has chosen to offer a more expansive definition of what we're allowed to acknowledge in our public spaces. Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng draws from work culture to create pieces that embrace and reorder the visual and linguistic clutter of politics, economics, and culture and is a reflection on the relationship between narrative, language, and the human condition.
In collaboration with the Downtown Improvement District (DID), Mayor Smiley, Commerce RI, and Rhode Island Foundation, DPNN seeks to be inclusive and uplift culture. The Lumina Festival is the city's annual winter festival to "enhance downtown’s vibrancy year-round" visited by over 300,000 attendees, according to DPNN. Primarily taking place in Kennedy Plaza which includes Biltmore Park and Burnside Park where many unhoused people have been able to frequent and spend time in. The juxtaposition of the city's unhoused, homeless policies, city planning efforts, and an installation that can be considered trash is a harmonious one. In regards to the I Just Work Here exhibition, a disabled woman visitor remarked, "Wow, [a homeless person] got a stove all the way into the park."
"Making a mayor like Mayor Smiley have to hang out next to trash is great. I've seen photographs and videos of him near the Pop! Installation which is 10 feet away from I Just Work Here so I know he's had to look at my appliances and pretend they're not there or just graciously smile," said Tiffiniy Cheng. Mayor Smiley has vowed to bring economic prosperity to the city and has allowed developers to take over buildings where artistic and economic activity thrive like Atlantic Mills. "Mayor Smiley seems to have a basic idea of economic revitalization like emptying downtown malls and erecting empty concrete buildings, so it's great to see that the city can see the value of appliances in their city center. Mayor Smiley and those like him should take a photo with the appliances," she continued.
I Just Work Here includes various sculptures such as a live customer service hotline and an installed telephone for registering complaints about the installation and recording information on the worst customer service calls, a self-help group, and beard nets that keep people's faces from the appliances. Guests of all economic levels are allowed to sit in city park chairs or stand quietly to view select screens under weeping city fluorescent lighting to the images of Ravage. Other festive accents include Gouche bowls (tart yogurt with fruit sporting striped umbrellas) and free flowing coffee. Recordings of calls to the self- help line will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition and may be played over the film.
The most unfavorable place to have your art show is in a third wave coffee shop or restaurant where the work looks worse when hung. Ravage is primarily shown in waiting rooms and now in city parks. Frustrated by performance art's preciousness and new filmmaking's vapid shininess, I Just Work Here is a performance artwork of experimental jokes and features the video art Ravage which is an un(satisfying) comedy-of-manners performance art film of 30 customer service calls, random accruing incompetencies, and the scream from inside your head as you walk to work.
Through a showcase of the art of the phone call, miscommunication, the void, unthinking, and commutes to work, among safe places like strip malls, the film and installation explore upper power's tendency to not do what they say or say what they do and how people and the services they have to use are bound by contracts but not by common beliefs. "They fuck us over and we're just supposed to take it. Customer service call centers are only increasing as online sales are only going up and the people who have to take these calls are supposed to not know what's going on. So, it only made sense to put the film into some trash buckets for viewing. So glad, the city gets art now," said Tiffiniy Cheng.
Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng (ngai) does experimental jokes as performance art, brought the pop-up restaurant as live action for our age in 2007 and developed a new model of political strategy behind some of the largest online protests in history, and has some poems published. She’s Ngai/MA, born in Macau as a boat person.
During the screenings, city goers will be conducting business. Hopefully, there will be some chairs available for viewers that aren't taken up by customers. The color scheme of the city will not be changed.
