 Hello, my name is Stephen Powers, I am the Chief Proprietor of IC Signs and I want to welcome you to Coney Island is still dreamland to a seagull. IC Signs is a functioning sign shop and a collaboration between several different sign painters and some of us are artists that want to be sign painters and some of us are sign painters that want to be artists and some of us are sign painters that want nothing to do with art and nothing to do with other sign painters and those are probably the best IC Signs sign writers. This installation of IC Signs is really special to us because for once we get to see everything we've ever done in one shot. We get to see the entire breadth of our now 10-year artistic output and it's really awesome. It's very awesome to see how far we've come and it's very frustrating to see how far we have yet to go. In Coney Island they advertise every emotion that you can have and we have taken all that information about the emotional advertising that's been done in Coney Island and we use it we pull it forward and we use it in our own work so there's a base layer of inspiration and there's a top layer of perspiration of all the work that we've done from the basic inspiration that we've got in Coney Island. I've only been working in Coney Island since 2002 but I've only really been working in art since 1999 so it's really my entire adult artistic output is informed by Coney Island it was it was mothered by Coney Island and I every painting I make is like I'm sending a card home to mama to let her know how I'm doing out here. In spite of all the gentrification and the expansion and the revitalization that has happened in Coney Island as long as you can go to the ocean as long as you can get a hot dog it's still paradise and you should go.