Partially Buried Cereal Aisle, 2013
Gondola shelving, cereal boxes, concrete, and hardware
48″ × 60″ × 24″
A single unit of grocery store shelving, tipped back and partially sunk into the ground, holds roughly forty boxes of cereal. Each box has been emptied and refilled with concrete. The cereal aisle, among the most ordinary sites of everyday choice, becomes a monument to the sheer volume of decisions contemporary life demands.
Faced with dozens of nearly identical products, even a trivial decision can become weighty, and the fear of choosing wrong can leave us unable to choose at all. Here, that paralysis takes physical form: the boxes can no longer be lifted, compared, or taken home. They have stopped moving, and in stopping, they have begun to settle into the earth like fossils.
The work references Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), for which Smithson piled earth onto a shed until its central beam cracked, then left the structure to decay. Partially Buried Cereal Aisle is likewise half-claimed by the ground and meant to change over time. Exposed to sun, rain, and wind, the printed cardboard fades, softens, and falls away. Eventually, only a spare geometric structure of metal and concrete remains: a relic of the present, and the skeleton of an aisle built around choice.