Wives Shopping
Remember going shopping with your mom as a kid? Walking around the store, eyes wide at the enormity of everything, just fantasizing. You could grab gum, toys and gizmos; some kids emptied the shelves and played like it was their basement. If your parents were like mine and you wanted to keep your teeth, you wouldn’t touch anything. You might steer your mom in front of one cool thing and beg like an orphan. Shopping was an experience.
Everything is electronic and it's not hard to imagine my children growing up and having kids of their own who don't even know what a bigbox store. “There was this place where you could buy a soccer ball and bananas and try on shoes.” Now you sit at home, click a button and and the world's stuff arrives at your doorstep. Our needs met first through online shopping delivered via drones, will eventually bring to fruition the Taoist dictum--the wise one does nothing and manifests everything--we will manifest the goods themselves in our kitchens with a nano printer.
The act of painting retail environments is inherently nostalgic. Nostalgia makes memories warmer in the way paint makes intrinsically cold things warm. This is a painting I did of #Hilariabaldwin with Rice-A-Roni. There were two inspirations behind this work. The first was a paparazzi picture of her shopping in a deli and the other was remembering the San Francisco treat. Moms used to stand in line at the grocery and leaf through tabloids of celebrities. Here we have #celebritymom caught shopping.
People make personal connections to things like Rice-A-Roni. The first time I heard someone say, “Utz is one of the brands I personally connect with”, it sounded strange. How could someone personally connect to a potato chip? This is the goal of brands- reaching out to our need to connect. Does that connection change when you shop online?
#Wivesshopping #retailtherapy #celebritymoms