Bright Side
2019-2025 | MODIFIED STARBUCKS SNACK BOXES | DIMENSIONS VARIABLE
Bright Side is made of hundreds of plastic Starbucks snack boxes, objects that once held processed morsels promising convenience and comfort. I collected them over the span of many guilty years in Honolulu, their original contents consumed, their surfaces reanimated through knife and color.
Each box now bears a silhouette, such as a house, a niu tree, a beach access, a landscape horizon, or a container ship. Some are identifiable as references from Honolulu, others drift into abstraction or more generic evocations of “the tropics,” that fantasy-space made by marketing, memory, and colonial occupation. I chose the title when I realized that what might seem at first playful or decorative——the bright colors, the modular composition——haunted me. The images began to remind me of the flattening effects of tourism, branding, and lifestyle aesthetics.
I think the use of spray paint introduces both a Skittles-like uniformity and a saturated mask. Color binds the trays together even as it hides their prior life. But the more I worked on this piece, the more I felt absence. These are not dioramas but voids. Their cheerful hues seem to hover uneasily over empty spaces where meaning used to reside, or perhaps never did.
When I reflect on the years-long process of collecting the boxes and consuming the snacks, I see how my private guilty habit can become a public confrontation with waste and aestheticization, as well as a longing, possibly for clarity, possibly for place. I’m still trying to understand how a place is both constructed and consumed, celebrated and abused.
