I was really inspired by Gabriel Orozco’s work with collage in the grocery store environment. His work was both fun and quirky, but its ephemeral value was what impacted me the most. I aimed to do a play on his work by going to a grocery store (Fortinos) and finding misplaced and randomly placed objects in the store aisles. I was trying to communicate and explore the theme of the accidental human-made collage. My initial thought was to place objects in weird spaces myself, but, after perusing the aisles I noticed that there were cans of tuna where peanut butter was, olive oil where toilet paper was, and many other strange objects in the wrong aisles. I did not have to stage anything because the collages were already made. I wanted to convey the themes of temporality and give off a humourous and quirky mood.

My subject matter is simply various misplaced grocery items in the wrong aisles. The way the objects were placed and the aisles and products they were mixed with were very unique and made the familiar unfamiliar. I used my Canon EOS T6i and simply walked through the various aisles and became continually enlightened by the amount of collages that are present in the grocery store. I used Fortinos as the site and was intrigued by the idea that all of the collages that I captured in a single shot were going to be erased in real time once the store clerks came and ‘cleaned up’ in each aisle, thus re-organizing the store(only for it to be disorganized again). This project was of interest to me because of its ephemeral nature and because of my inspiration from Gabriel Orozco’s work over the years. I love to do fun, quirky pieces, and this can classify as one of them.