Kenworth and Klein will collaborate on a project titled Your Store. Your Store seeks to move beyond retail peddling to stock the empty storefront window of Artist Television Access at 992 Valencia Street with objects and hand-made animations that tell stories of people of the Valencia corridor. We have chosen to work in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods the Mission District. The neighborhood has gone through considerable change and today, boasts some of the city’s top restaurants, shops and cultural institutions. The gentrification from crime-ridden streets to a “must see” destination reflects a unique cultural genesis that we feel deserves some personalization and context.

For this project we will be working with local merchants, neighborhood groups and individuals to collect their stories, memories, thoughts and reflections about the area. As holders of these impressions, we will document each individual expression of the neighborhood by either creating a sculptural representation of the memory/story or by transforming the actual audio recollections into hand-drawn stop-motion animations. We will also teach art and animation workshops, in the community at the public library so that people can make their own objects. In October, we will arrange theses objects and animations in a retail style display. Shelves will be constructed in the window to show each object with care and a video screen with sound piped onto the street will play the animated stories of the people in the neighborhood. The window, open 24-hours a day, will be accessible to any passer-by as a home-style advertisement of the neighborhood.

Your Store will be a unique and personal reflection of the people who make up the area and a community building experiment disguised as a retail storefront. With this project we hope to give the Valencia Street corridor a physical voice that illuminates important historical events, cultural identifications and personal reflections of the people and places