MARY CARTER TAUB
Retail Trail: Color Bombs, 2024

“Retail Trail is a social practice that explores modern material existence, consumerism and mindfulness on a personal scale.

The ephemeral, site based work uses materials mined from my household goods. Each material (object) was headed for the trash, recycling or donation bin. Plucked from family jetsam, the objects have been culled by color and repurposed into single hue installations called “Color Bombs,” the current iteration of Retail Trail.

Color Bomb materials are mass produced and easily ignored in their “native habitat.” By placing these materials/ objects in a new context, their prescriptive identities are shaken up and scrambled. These familiar objects are transient, traveling items, and our distance from these objects is collapsed and intimacy created and preciousness raised. For example, a kitchen rubber glove may be manufactured in Asia then shipped to a distribution center in the Midwest in the U.S. then trucked to North Carolina where I buy it in my local big box store; I then wear it in my kitchen while washing dishes until a tear causes the glove to leak so I discard the glove which is repurposed into an art material for the Color Bomb titled “Sassy Grass” (named for the green paint chip sample in the installation). The glove and other objects retain their original and itinerant history while their value is elevated, presented as art and a byproduct of my retail trail.”

Retail Trail is on view by appointment from September 19 to October 19 and is part of the 2024 Organizer Series at Hodges Taylor which is programmed from a selection of proposals received through an open call for projects.