Project description • Attention: Mr. Inglewick

Attention Mr. Inglewick is a looped video projection work that reveals, in alphabetical order, approximately 90 mis-spellings of my last name - Ingelevics - as they occurred on envelopes addressed to him. These were collected by my now-deceased father in the late 1960s to early 1970s and were found by me, neatly collected together, in his house following his death in 2001.

They struck me immediately for two reasons - first, I don't experience the extreme kinds of mis-spellings of "Ingelevics" that he did any longer and second, many of the people corresponding with him had easy access to the correct spellling of his name as they were either responding to his letters or were working for the same company.

At the time he collected these he was working his way up the corporate ladder in a national transportation company. It was also a time when many postwar immigrants to North America were starting to achieve material success. It is my own conjecture that the mis-speallings were a milder extension of the backlash against new immigrants that occurred in the late 1940s and 1950s, when the term, "D.P.s" (displaced persons), was used as an insult. Since it was no longer acceptable to physically assault new immigrants this form of passive/aggressive behaviour could always be laughed off as a "mistake" or a "joke". The definition of a "Freudian slip" is an utterance that is a " verbal mistake that is thought to reveal an unconscious belief, thought, or emotion" and the degree and range of these "errors" fit that description perfectly.