Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Preview image of work. Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag , Safeway 29453

2015.32.3

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Safeway

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Artist

Dean Kessmann

Title

Safeway

Creation Date

2005

Century

21st century

Dimensions

34 x 24 in. (86.36 x 60.96 cm)

Classification

Photographs

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag

Credit Line

Gift of the Artist

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

2015.32.3

The blooming, translucent shapes of Kessman’s photographs reveal a new perspective on a quotidian object: the plastic shopping bag. Its marketing message, printed on the bag, is obscured or morphed by the manipulation of its surface, whose detailed texture becomes the dominant focus of the images. Kessman shows how mesmerizing the bag becomes under physical and optical transformation. Using a flatbed scanner, he defamiliarizes the bag by compressing it into something resembling a blob, stain, or drop caught in liquid suspension and evoking a membrane or an x-ray. Whether Kessman’s focus is on elevating the ordinary to the beautiful or on criticizing consumerism and waste, his “brand of objectification,” writes critic Nord Wennerstrom, “offers a fresh acknowledgment of the moral ambiguity inherent in ‘environmentally conscious’ consumerism.”