The Corner Store

Ode to the Corner Store

Spring ’12

For my final sophomore design project at Trinity, I decided to explore the artistic potential of the items I consume and use, focusing on the corner store. The corner store is a place where the whole community meets and shops, but it’s often overlooked, under-appreciated, and stigmatized. I chose to draw from the candy and snacks and drinks that I got from the gas station down the street from my dorm. I wanted to take my trash and transform it into something that would draw people in, something they would look at and consider art.

In this series, I tried to use a combination of all mediums and techniques that I learned over the course of the semester. Some of the final pieces are entirely digital, which allowed me to play with scale, pattern, and repetition in a way that would be impossible manually. If I had a chance to extend this project, I’d wallpaper an entire corner store with designs from this series, making the store itself into a work of art.

As my vision for this series continually expanded, I made a crossover from more “digital” or “graphic” posters to sculptural wall pieces, exploring the activation of three-dimensional space using the actual wrappers (and sometimes candy) in the pieces. I’m currently still developing pieces in this series because Skittles keeps coming out with new wrappers. Thanks Skittles. From Kandinsky, Van Gogh, and Matisse, to Digimon, the Power Rangers, and the PowerPuff Girls, I was communicated with via colors frequently in my youth. Each piece is a commentary on social interactions and the way color is used in consumerism to manipulate sentiment.