Grocery Store

Sung Moon

For Clutch attendants, there is the responsibility to carefully represent the gallery and the artworks to visitors, but also to ensure that the theme of Terra/Form, is delivered to the public. To do this, I was interested in taking Clutch to its most natural habitat. For me, that meant disarming Clutch from my hands, and placing it within the context of the environment. I had to make sure that there was a correlation between the environment and Clutch itself. The environment and Clutch together had to create a harmonious narrative that allowed people to understand the exhibition without any descriptions and by relating it to their everyday lifestyle, thus making it seem familiar to them. But in order to do that, the clutch had to pick its own location, not me.

When I walked inside a grocery store one day, I picked up a bag of turkey ham from the cooler for my sandwich. As soon as I took the turkey out from the compartment and held it in my left hand, Clutch on my right arm,  I couldn’t stop but notice the empty space that now separates the bacon and the original swiss cheese in the compartment. This negative space that I created, by taking out the turkey ham broke the rhythm of all the artificial colors and produce that the grocery store lined up for its customers. Therefore, I thought it could be the most natural thing for me to now place Clutch between the bacon and the swiss cheese, replacing the turkey ham that I was going to eat for lunch.

It was Thursday morning around 9:00 AM, so people were grabbing their juice and their muscle milk, their mind fresh like a blank canvas- it was the perfect moment for me to step back, close to the nachos and observe the gallery opening. One guy walked in and I think was looking for turkey ham as well, but since I took the last one, and Clutch was sitting in the spot for the turkey he naturally took Clutch out and opened it to see if there was turkey inside. Realizing that this wasn’t what he was looking for, he gently placed it back where it had been. What he saw in there, and how he interpreted the artworks, while critical, will remain personal. This is important because we are accustomed to everything being shared on social media today. The moments that people digitally share these days, create a chain of a digital map that can never be tracked. But the beauty of it is its purity like the beauty of infancy. I think the feeling of finding something new and remembering that moment, in its relation to the placed environment is  critical to the theme of  Clutch. And if people start to see  Clutch again somewhere else, carried by a different person, that overlapping experience could be powerful enough to change his or her pattern for the day. “Will I see that Clutch again at the corner of Michigan and Huron?”

 In conclusion, I do not think this interaction was coincidental at all, although I am fortunate for deciding to have turkey ham sandwich on that day. I believe that if the environment presents itself to the clutch first, the Clutch would take in the features of the built environment and present itself in its natural form and that provokes the emotion of the exhibition: Terra/Form. For future clutch carriers, every moment with Clutch should be a grand opening as it finds itself in the context of the nature that we live in. Although it’s temporary and constantly mobile, sometimes I believe that a glimpse creates more curiosity than anything else.