Gwen MacGregor

Packaged

sculptural installation

mixed media, 48 × 12 × 42 inches overall, 2014; exhibited at MKG127, Toronto, 2014

This sculpture presents seven packages on a wooden table. The packages contain non-perishable garbage collected over three months while living in Fort Kochi India. As a left over of the British Raj, international mail from India must first be taken to a tailor and sown into a cloth bag. I sorted all the garbage by kind, had them sewn into packages and then had them mailed back to Toronto. It took three months for them to get back to Canada, whereas the table was ordered on Amazon and arrived in three days. The work offers a complicated snapshot of the entangled world of production and consumption, across time and space.