Ian Johnston makes art out of shopping carts and a huge nylon bag in MOCA Jacksonville exhibit

By:  Charlie Patton

When fully inflated, the bag is 22 feet high and 18 feet wide, “sort of egg shaped,” says its creator Ian Johnston. Inside the bag are more than 20 shopping carts, weighing close to a ton (about 1,800 pounds). Attached to the bag are four vacuums, two of which pump air into the bag, two or which suck air out of the bag.

When the bag deflates the nylon clings to the shopping carts. It takes 14 minutes for the bag to fully inflate, then deflate again, a cycle that is triggered when someone enters the Atrium Gallery, Johnson said.

“Like rust, it never sleeps,” Johnston said.

The sculpture also has sound effects. Johnston spent time during the last two weeks recording Jacksonville sounds like Big Jim, the 120-year-old, 32-inch copper steam whistle that blows for 30 seconds four times a day from atop the JEA building on Main Street.

Johnston has titled the exhibit “Fish Tales,” though he says that he’s “not really sure why” he called it that.

The artistic process that led Johnston to create “Fish Tales” began when he became interested in using a “vacuum forming process” to create ceramics. He would put clay around an object, enclose the clay-wrapped object in a plastic bag and use a vacuum to suck the air from the bag. He said he has made about 700 ceramic pieces using that process.

More recently, he created a series of works that formed an exhibition called “Reinventing Consumption,” which was exhibited at six Canadian museums and galleries. One part of “Reinventing Consumption,” the 2013 sculpture “The Chamber,” was similar to “Fish Tales” in that it included a large bag cyclically inflating and deflating. What was inside the bag in “The Chamber” were objects Johnston acquired by “intercepting garbage on its way to the dump.”

“Fish Tales” replaces the garbage with the shopping carts, although the carts acquired by the museum staff are in a sense garbage, having been discarded by retailers and sent to a material recycling broker.

The other major difference is that “Fish Tales” moves the bag off the floor into the air. Like “The Chamber” and the other sections of “Reinventing Consumption,” it can be considered a comment on modern consumerism, Johnston said. He said the shopping carts “as symbols are amazing.”

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