Stephanie M. Kim

This piece is a culmination of a multi-year effort. I’ve been collecting pictures of random litter like gloves and beverage bottles all over New York that most people overlook, but to me, I love the idea of anthropomorphizing the glove. Even if it’s a replica of the human hand, there’s something really uncanny about the synthetic extension of it and pretending it’s able to operate on its own! For this piece, I extracted photos of gloves and beverages and scanned construction paper to compile a digital-collage version of a vending machine. You’d find this at a public park, neglected and probably next to the bathroom building.

I’m able to use the machine quite easily, but when I tried to reconstruct this vending machine, I failed to remember the simple components that are part of it. This made me think about how utilities and infrastructure are often overlooked and taken for granted.