P.O.P. Portraits

Within the contemporary retail environment, individuals are subject to sophisticated and complex profiling endeavors that seek to understand consumer behavior and purchasing habits. Nowhere is this condition more prevalent than within the disciplined space of a Wall-Mart store. Here, data collected through the store’s point-of-purchase monitoring ensures that while the substance of consumer’s transaction at Wall-Mart maybe fleeting, the information they leave behind is not.P.O.P. Portraits is a piece that alerts the consumer to the process of corporate surveillance that is implicit in their patronage of Wall-Mart and other large retailers. Here, the receipt’s role as a proxy used to verify the transaction of goods is recast to describe the simultaneous, yet unstated transaction of personal data. In P.O.P. Portraits the artist swaps out rolls of large retailer’s conventional receipt paper with rolls that have been altered through the selective removal the receipt’s heat emulsion coating. When a receipt is printed on these rolls, an itemized ticket appears only where the emulsion remains. Observing their receipt, customers are presented with text print-outs that reveal the faces of customers that were captured on video surveillance as they entered the store.

The image of customers depicted in the itemized descriptions and values of their own purchases is both unsettling and immediate. It serves as an instant representation of retailer’s desire to view their customers through the reductive lens of purchasing habits. P.O.P. Portraits foists this realization upon the consumers, and reveals the extent to which retailers covertly carry out these activities. In doing so, the piece serves as cognitive dissonance against the belief that big box retailers provide their goods at a discount. In retail, nothing is cheap.