
Ghosts ...And They Stood Before Their Forgotten Livelihood
Artist
J. Desy Schoenewies
(Spearfish, SD)
Medium
Oil on Canvas
Size
40” x 40” x 2”
Description
Artist Statement:
The bright colors on the catchy label designs that filled the supermarket aisle kept me amused as I stocked those shelves during my youth. The Covid-19 pandemic found me longing for familiar former grocery shopping experiences, where all I had to worry about was my budget and the calories. I began to think about the evolution of the American supermarket as a testament of abundance, yet still prone to the fickle demands of convenience. Within a single lifetime, this essential space has swelled from modest corner shops to super-giant-mega-marts stocked with endless selections. Now, we demand our basic goods to be delivered our doorsteps, emptying this once social space to instead fill our homes with cardboard boxes. My latest series of paintings are an attempt to capture impermanence, visualized as a lifetime’s worth of change and framed around a familiar common space, the grocery store.