M. Carson Day / Work / Our Towne™
“The morning star always gets wonderful bright in the minute before it has to go.” — Stage Manager from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
The currently ongoing and growing body of work, Our Towne™, is based upon the contents of a hobby model kit depicting an idealized version of an American Main Street. This work attempts to “build” the model without assembling the kit, rather, using it as a diving board from which to jump into the psyche of American life through the lens of the fabled American Dream.
Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, in which the setting is always the theater in which the script is being performed, is always at top of mind. This mechanism implicates the audience as not only spectators, but performers/townsfolk/tourists; the narrator is simultaneously omnipresent and presented as a character.
The installation, a pie left cold in Our Towne™, invokes Wilder’s play in this way: the viewer not only participates in the work by entering it, but also becomes a denizen as they meet their neighbor and are walked through town by an audio guide.
In this town, Our Towne™ , we are characters in a familiar fiction, living in the shadow of an impossible past. Main Street is crumbling and there is no money to fix it. We are left paranoid amidst the ruins and the ghosts and the false impressions.