THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT THIS IS WHAT YOU GET Katelyn Kopenhaver March 20, 2026 Bakehouse Art Complex, Studio 45

During an open studio at Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami, variations of the phrase THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT THIS IS WHAT YOU GET are broken apart and screen printed directly onto the walls for the duration of the event while visitors move in and out of the space. A horizontal band of language wraps the room, altering the environment as it unfolds. No explanation is offered inside the studio. Open studios rely on unspoken behavioral scripts: the artist is present and open; visitors look, photograph, assess, and move on. This performance makes that structure visible by replacing it with a procedural one. Laboring with ink, pressure, and screens, I function as operator rather than host. The studio becomes both site of production and behavioral installation.

Written for this work, the phrase operates as a direct address in the second person — authoritative, flat, without an identifiable speaker. WANT and GET press against each other, leaving a gap that remains unresolved. It lives as bureaucratic statement, promise, warning, transaction — all delivered with the tone of inevitability. Visitors encounter the phrase in fragments before they can read it whole, assembling meaning gradually. By the time it resolves, they are already inside it. Small cameras positioned on the walls record the accumulation of language and the movement of people through the space, tracking how visitors orient themselves within the system — a secondary layer of the work.

I construct situations that feel ordinary long enough for participation to precede awareness. This work does not tell viewers what to think — it establishes conditions in which thought, behavior, and attention become observable.