2000 - 2004

I didn’t grow up with Wal-Mart. The megastores were first opened in Europe in 1997 after I had moved to the US. So when I encountered the store, and learned about their People Greeters, I was intrigued.

In the summer of 2000, I applied for a job, took a training course and was hired as a People Greeter at the Wal-Mart store in Skowhegan, Maine. In between shifts I painted a fresco on the walls of the store’s Layaway Department, once regional headquarters gave the manager permission to accept my offer. Familiar scenes of downtown Skowhegan - churches, local bars, people celebrating, and simply living their daily lives - were interspersed with images of Wal-Mart merchandise and members of my family performing domestic chores and playing.

A year later, the fresco was half obscured by stacks of Wal-Mart merchandise: Lay-Z-Boy armchairs, Duracell battery packs and artificial trees. I continued working as a Greeter, retouching scratched areas of the fresco whenever there was time.

In 2003, I consulted the Italian restorer Renato Giangualano, who was visiting Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, about the condition of the fresco. Giangualano had just completed the restoration of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s frescoes in the Basilica dei Santi Faustino e Giovita in Brescia.

In our restoration report, Giangualano concluded that the scratches and scoring on the fresco surface were important abrasions. The scratches were the exact areas where the reality of Wal-Mart was slicing back into the project, and they needed to be preserved. The substantial ‘damage’ showed how the store was efficiently producing visible traces of its own accelerated archaeology.

In 2004, Wal-Mart headquarters ordered a change in the livery colors of their stores worldwide, from gray with dark blue to beige and tan. The fresco at the Layaway Department of the Wal-Mart store in Skowhegan had to be removed since it did not fit into the new color scheme.

Materials & Actions: 12 fresco panels, total dimensions 15x7 feet, video, work as a Wal-Mart People Greeter.

Location: Wal-Mart, Skowhegan, Maine.