Home Economics, Steel frame with shopping cart mounted on steel pole, 2025.
Robert Loring
My work explores the tenuous relationship between shelter and commerce in contemporary society. Through sculptures that repurpose familiar symbols—the shopping cart, the house frame—I examine how housing has been transformed from a basic human necessity into a market commodity. Home Economics confronts viewers with the paradox of our housing crisis: we possess abundant materials and technology to shelter everyone, yet homelessness persists as a seemingly permanent feature of our landscape. By rendering temporary materials in durable steel or framing transient objects within domestic outlines, I create tension between permanence and impermanence, visibility and invisibility. This installation serves both as a memorial to housing insecurity and as interactive prompts for engagement. By placing these works in public spaces between institutional buildings, I position housing insecurity where it exists—in the gaps of our social infrastructure. Through these pieces, I invite viewers to question why we accept temporary solutions to what should be recognized as a fundamental human right—the right to shelter.