Consumerism

This work is a personal response to consumerism in our society. The shopping cart is an everyday object that is loaded with significance. I associate the shopping cart with over consumption, excess, and addiction. We live in a convenience oriented society where everything that we eat can easily be bought from one super store, where what is typically offered is over-packaged, disposable, synthetic and so far removed from its natural origins that it no longer has any nutritional or spiritual value. The shopping cart encourages and facilitates the compulsion to buy excessively. It is a manufactured vehicle that can only roll on manufactured ground in a manufactured environment made to contain as many items as we think we need to fill the emptiness of our souls through our mouths and wallets. In my work, the shopping cart is anthropomorphized. It represents both the consumer and the system, itself consumptive, that provides for the consumer.