Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Sandy Callander

Proud Futures Shipping Pallet (With Pineapple)

A sculpture in the form of a white shipping pallet featuring a heavily stylised graphic on the face of it which reads “proud to be trading the futures of tomorrow,” placed on a base of two found shipping pallets stacked on top of one another on which is placed a real pineapple in the front left corner.

““Proud to be trading the futures of tomorrow” is the slogan for a trucking company based in the Greater Toronto Area, and I think as a phrase it is a perfect example of the type of rhetorical valorisation embedded in the structures of capitalism following the development of globalisation. In taking this slogan and making it difficult to read, the work stylises the slogan as an alienation of the viewer to the words themselves, enacting a critique of the logistics networks established under a globalised free market as it arose in the end of the 20th century. The shipping pallet itself is a loaded object particularly in this context, one which is both ubiquitous in everyday life and also an insidious reference to labour exploitation on a global scale and the inauguration of the newly precarious working class formed under technocratic advances. Through these semiotic markers, the work is intended to bring to mind notions of industry, capital, labour, and transition, inviting the viewer to consider these areas while engaging with the work on their own terms. ”