The Art of Presenting One's Self: The Never Full Paper Bag Project

The Never Full Designer Paper Bag project was inspired by, you guessed it, a paper bag.
At the beginning stages of COVID, I began saving grocery bags thinking I could repurpose them into something.

​The brown paper reminded me of the monochromatic leathers used in Louis Vuitton bags. It made me think the counterfeit luxury handbags were about as common paper yet ironically enough horrible for the environment.
I started making designer grocery bags by painting the Louis Vuittion logo on different versions of bags.

I know what you are thinking,....but what about copyright? You are taking a logo that isn't yours and using it in your art. What's that about?
This is to demostrate how business who take designer logos and use it to create replicas for cheap. It's also to showcase mass production and the process it takes to make something.
In order to create the Louis Vuittion paper bag, the silkscreen process varied by piece.

Some were printed on directly and others required more work. The bags with color required tracing the image, retracing again, painting, silkscreening several different times. The bags with perfectly aligned logo required to be printed on six different times----Which means! in order to achieve proper alighnment, after each print, the screen had to be washed and dried.
I wanted to create a visual of mass production that are of poor quality mixed items that required alot of time using the same material using the same logo design. It asks the audience to reflect on what product would they choose base on quantity, quality or craftsmanship.

Never Full Grocery Bag project also ties in with how fashion consumers, like myself, who has given up food or groceries in order to buy a designer handbag. What are we trying to tell the world? You have a designer handbag but an empty grocery cart.