Everything Must Go does for shopping carts what Marcel Duchamp did for the urinal. Curators Shannon Young and Chris Mona invited artists to create works in, on, and around the familiar grocery store container and the results are well worth seeing.
At Timothy Nohe’s cart, press the two red buttons and listen to endless audio of shoppers reading the contents of their grocery receipts. It invokes the repetitive gesture of yanking boxes, cans, and bottles from shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle, but in this case, your cart remains empty.
In Stuff: Another Self Portrait, writer/artist/animated-videomaker Linda Franklin places a crocheted female figure in a cart festively decorated with plastic bottle tops. In an accompanying video, we hear a distressing story about homelessness, reminding us of the re-use of carts by those who have lost shelter in any form and its closets and drawers. The narrator of the video segues from dumpster diving to making art from the “stuff” that she finds, to her mother’s demise at the hands of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Dawn Bond’s video, Cart Violations, records the adventures of two shopping carts rolling around an eloquent post-industrial space, apparently an abandoned formica plant. At one moment, they are metal gladiators; at another, metal dancers.
Joseph Faura’s portable shrine—a shopping cart of course—holds four familiar Christian images mounted in front of a dozen glowing tealights. Below, the cart is filled with more candles and vessels holding glittering costume jewelry and glistening pebbles.
Two artists transform carts into beautiful sculptures that will forever alter how you view these mundane objects. For Pickit, Lincoln Mudd inserts wooden slats through the metal bars of his cart, creating crisp, linear patterns that command the surrounding space. In Carreta Roja, Wilfredo Valladares welds metal arcs around a small red cart, creating visual energy atop the rigid platform below.
In Kelly Bell’s animation, Mousetrap, the cart is overturned, imprisoning a hapless pink figure within. We can hear conversations and footsteps, and then the rattle of the cart/cage before a mouse ambles past.
Everything Must Go—a palliative counter to holiday shopping—is on view at the Cade Center for Fine Arts Gallery at Anne Arundel Community College until Wednesday, December 8.
Filed in: Cade Center for Fine Arts.
Doreen Bolger is always on the move because she can’t stop seeing, supporting, and writing about the arts in and around Baltimore City. Her lengthy love affair for the arts began in Long Island when her father, an executive in the textile industry, brought home breathtaking fabrics every night from the heart of the garment district. 
Doreen, thank you for putting this up; it was quite an interesting project that seemed to just grow as soon as i had my cart in hand. thanks for putting the link in too.
i wrote Chris that I hope maybe we can propose in march an ART CARTS thing at Artscape 2011. with more artists too, and a parade?
Thanks again, Linda