Art+Culture (artandculture.com)
“Imagine you’re at the supermarket, one weekday afternoon, sometime after work, absent-mindedly pushing your trolley down the aisles for a bit of grocery shopping. You trundle down the neon-lit canyons of brightly coloured packaging – cereals, soda, toilet paper – and as you pass by the canned goods something catches your eye. Among the peas and beans you spot a series of cans with elegant off-white labels, featuring a delicately rendered reclining female nude. The evocative line drawing reminds you of voluptuous beauties decorating ancient Greek vases, but the figure sports a few extra limbs, gracefully arching three spare arms above her hips. This is more than canned veggies. You’ve stumbled upon shopdropped art by Natalie Reis. This is your lucky day.
Shopdropping, a form of culture jamming, can be described as reversed shoplifting. Instead of removing merchandise from a store, shopdropping artists buy goods, alter them, and then surreptitiously sneak them back into the store and place them on the shelves. Some artists carefully cut around the bar codes, so the items can be purchased again by appreciative shoppers. Most artistically enhanced products are canned goods, but artists have also modified milk cartons, packets of flour, and jars of coffee, amongst others.
This simple art intervention subverts commercial space and turns it into a venue for contemporary art. Shopdropping makes a positive contribution to our hum-drum visual landscape by…”
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