8’ x 9’ x 12’
Audio: 60:00
Pantheon addresses capitalism and how human relations and social structures are mediated through signs and objects. Viewers can sit on the lower beams where seating is provided in four places. With this gesture the audience becomes socialized within the structure of the work and is framed as on a stage. Straight lengths of white neon tube illuminate the space, seating, and participants underneath and contribute to the ‘marketplace’ status, social behavior, and collective experience of this work. PA speakers are mounted to the top beams with a composed soundtrack compiled from field recordings, music, and spoken word. Pantheon explores how advertising codes are transferred to the consumer. The 25 signs present 50 abstracted corporate logos that have been altered and simplified into modernists tropes where the content and specific identity has been removed. This reduces them to a morphology of color and code, mimicking the corporate landscape we inhabit. This code is a form of socialization and generates a formal set of social relations analogous to money. The collected signs represent a selection from banks, credit card companies, oil and gas, fast food, fashion, media, entertainment, auto industries, and the military. All these relations form a system in the industrial framework of the political economy, where the individual is alienated by signs, and social relations are fetishized.