A Bright New Grocery Store, Made Entirely of Recycled Plastic
In Robin Frohardt’s immersive installation, the cereal rattles like it’s filled with bottle caps and
The Plastic Bag Store, presented by UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, is a public art installation and immersive film experience created by artist and director Robin Frohardt designed to take place in a retail storefront. Employing humor, puppetry and craft, Frohardt focuses a critical lens upon our culture of consumption and convenience — specifically, the enduring effects of our single-use plastics.
Robin Frohardt, The Plastic Bag Store in downtown Los Angeles (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) "LOS ANGELES — There's something strange about The Plastic Bag Store, a bright new grocery in downtown Los Angeles. At first glance, their frozen pizza looks like any other pepperoni delicacy, but upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that the cheese is wrinkled, the toppings are trimmed with expiration dates, and the brand name, “Bagarino,” is completely alien. This pizza, and everything else in the store, is made from discarded plastic.
The store is the creation of artist, playwright, and puppet designer Robin Frohardt, who has teamed up with the Center for the Art of Performance (CAP) UCLA to transport the The Plastic Bag Store from New York’s Times Square to Los Angeles. In Frohardt’s immersive installation, the cereal rattles like it’s filled with bottle caps, the water bottles are filled with a dirty, cloudy liquid, and advertisements for faraway dollar stores are printed on the banana peels. Frohardt has collected thousands of plastic objects, like salad containers, floss sticks, and lighters, and transformed them into uncanny replicas of common grocery store foods, like tomatoes, rotisserie chicken, and pre-packaged sushi.
The Plastic Bag Store has enough artificial produce to rival your neighborhood Ralph’s, and depressingly illuminates the sheer scale of plastic waste humans consume. Frohardt’s project recycles only a sliver of the 350 million tons of plastic the world produces annually, and, as an interactive display inside the store teaches us, none of that plastic ever decomposes.
Visitors can touch everything inside The Plastic Bag Store, so make sure to study the maze on the back of a box of Yucky Shards, or pick up vintage floppy discs from the deli. Frohardt has thoughtfully designed every piece of packaging, mimicking familiar brands’ copy with her own sardonic humor."— Renée Reizman, July 4, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Hyperallergic website.
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