Lighter Fluid Lemonade Stand Installation
To complete the final step in stealing the fire from the gods of our generation, artists Abars and Phil America collaborated with Think Tank Gallery director Jacob Patterson to design a lemonade stand that sold zippo lighters that were filled with kerosene, and copitas to fill with the fire of mezcal. Simply assembled and covered in straightforward writing borrowed again from “Monkey Wrench Gang” commentary on capitalism, the stand was surrounded in intricate neon fabrications of America’s graffiti mounted on an iconic newsstand that last hosted a Shepard Fairey pop up.
The delicate neon pieces call upon the temporal nature of graffiti taking back public and advertising space, while contrasting the brevity of a throw up with the painstaking labor that the medium of neon requires. Limited edition merchandise (including this zine by Willie Gomez and Dino Nama) stocked the shelves of the lemonade stand, while artist and mezcal aficionado Claudia Ramirez shared the legend of Mayahuel and her 400 rabbits with passersby and fans. After purchasing Molotov cocktails from the vending machine nearby, participants could walk over to ORIGEN and complete their functional art object by acquiring the fire, and hearing our modernization of a centuries old legend to reconstruct modern narratives to be more useful to The People of 2018.