Industry of the Ordinary’s Supermarketing

Industry of the Ordinary are champions of normalcy. They use performance art, sculpture, text, and an array of other media to celebrate “the customary, the everyday, and the usual.”

For the project “Supermarketing I,” they mailed brown paper bags labeled with the phrase “I want to be ordinary” to people in cities around the world, asking that recipients photograph themselves holding the bags and send in the photos. The resulting images offer a playful look at the act of (mostly) grocery shopping—a sort of shared mundanity for people of means in the developed world.

Like much of Industry’s work, the series is provocative without being pretentious, functioning as both an overt love letter to the common behavior that unites and, perhaps, a nod to that sparkle of individuality that each of us nevertheless possesses.

You can see all the photos here.