Shopping Cart Collapsing Beneath the Weight of My Needs was inspired by this recurring dream that I have where I'm endlessly shopping in some sort of Walmart superstore kind of warehouse. I don't know where it is, and I never finish shopping, and it's an incredible banal dream that feels more alarming for how boring it is than any terrors involved. In attempting to figure out what this means, I think about the iconography of a shopping cart - a vessel that holds whatever we're buying (or not buying, in the case of online shopping where I fill carts with items that I never actually follow through on purchasing). It's more of an idea of a cart, than an actual cart. I also think of the hunger inside of me that can seem to only be soothed by window shopping the internet, or making a Target run, this impulsive need to acquire things. But it doesn't stop at things; I want this lifestyle, or that dream, or a different personality, to be funnier, to get invited to places or events, and so on. Tangible and intangible desires, filling tangible and intangible carts. Half the time I don't even know what I want, but I know that I am hungry, and there is a deep psychic pain to that longing that I haven't figured out how to satiate.

Taylor Lee Nicholson