ShopAround (1996-1999)
“Is your shopping cart full?” The ShopAround series proposes this question to an American culture obsessed with consumerism. Created over three years of collecting, assembling, texturing, painting and glossing, artist Richard Hinger uses the shopping cart theme to attract observers and encourage their own interpretation and consideration of the priority we give shopping and the effect it has on all of our lives.”The American Dream is alive and well as long as your shopping all the time,” says Hinger.”The spend and discard syndrome is firmly established in us, almost as part of our genetic code. We are becoming like human shopping carts. That’s what the sculptures suggest to many people - a metamorphosis into what we do with our lives.”
Hinger adds, “The carts are symbols of our culture’s acquisitiveness, rolling collectors of the latest fashion, the current fad or the next sensational product. The shopping carts are easy to read receptors of our new “Buyological Psychoperdium Function” which is triggered by the tactile sensation of the shopping cart handle in both hands or the sight of the particularly pleasing image of an e-commerce cart on a new flat screen display.”
Our connection to Hinger’s carts can be uneven and tenuous, or full bore and strong. This series invites us to contemplate our psycho-social connection to the cart and evaluate the extent to which we are engulfed by it.
