Go Buy
2023-PRESENT | MODIFIED GROCERY BAGS | DIMENSIONS VARIABLE
Go Buy began when the handle of a grocery bag ripped off while I was carrying my food out of the store, causing everything to drop on the ground.
Each work in the series starts with a bag from chains like Safeway or Foodland, which is then altered. Handles are added to handles, layered in tiers, or sprouting upward in useless abundance. What was once a straightforward container becomes overarticulated, nearly ungraspable. Seeing these small mutations, I started thinking about the rituals and absurdities of consumption: how we carry things, how we perform usefulness, how we mistake abundance for improvement. The bags feel to me like props for a tragicomic performance: too many exits, none of them viable.
In Hawai‘i, we live with capitalist material culture in a general sense, but regular grocery bags are also artifacts of our specific place, one saturated with imported goods, corporate signage, and grocery stores that double as community hubs and battlegrounds for cultural and economic identity. Food can cost a lot of money in Hawai‘i. Even buying groceries creates friction between function and fantasy, necessity and surplus.
