Artist and environmentalist Robin Frohardt
"What's the one thing that's missing from every grocery store experience?
Not enough plastic bags, am I right?"
- Robin Frohardt, creator and director of The Plastic Bag Store
By Travis Wilkinson
The Plastic Bag Store may appear to be any other storefront grocery; however, the items found here are all created from trash picked up off of New York City’s streets. Inside, you'll find your healthy and hearty kale made from L.L. Bean delivery bags, oranges made from thrown away Toys "R" Us bags, some “Bagarino” frozen pizza, and "Bag and Jerry's” Ice Cream. You'll even find some of your favorite magazines like “Bag Appétit” and “Bagmopolitan.”
The Plastic Bag Store, an immersive art experience and film being staged by the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival this month from Jan. 20 to 30, is filled with humor and craft. Artist Robin Frohardt designed the Store to comment on the consumption and convenience of single-use plastics. According to The World Counts, 5 trillion plastic bags will be consumed this year alone. That's 160,000 plastic bags per second, less than 1 percent of which will be recycled. Single-use plastics are fully synthetic and, for the most part, will never decompose. However, when designing the exhibit, Frohardt says she "didn't want to overwhelm people with statistics but wanted to create a familiar visually tactile experience that they could relate to,” according to Times Square NYC.
According to the exhibit’s website, several times a day, the Store transforms into a micro-cinema for a series of dynamic films featuring puppets that tell a darkly comedic story of how future generations might interpret the plastic waste we leave behind.
Store visits are free. Tickets to the Immersive Puppet Film range from $20-$30 and can be bought on The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival website.The installation is located at The Wrigley Building, 410 N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago.