Human resources shopping center

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The central concept in this image is the ubiquitous nature of excessive consumerism present in today's society. The Human Resources Shopping Center is a store, with multiple compartments, where you can find people for sale, like products. These people are on display in tubular cabins made of glass. They do this based on their own free will. Each human for sale has the price written on top of the cabin using a typographic symbol for generic monetary units. At the bottom of the shop windows, I chose to identify the "products" with character names taken from the dystopian novel "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin. In today's society, people are just "human resources" in companies, often having just code names, IDs.

The product named D-503, on the far right in the image, has a banner that says "ONE STATE HUMAN". In the dystopian novel "We", the person lives in the One State, a city-nation, constructed almost entirely of glass. Moreover, the special offer, I-330, in the same novel, is the lover of D-503.

The idea for this image came to me by seeing how everyone does his best to sell his services or himself, using resumes (CVs - Curriculum Vitae), from bricklayers to scientists and researchers. If one cannot have a profoundly intellectual pursuit, then people tend to make use of their body and rely on their physical properties, for example: the muscular mass or beauty - storekeepers, body guards, models and prostitutes. If we think of the past, in ancient times people were sold as slaves. Nowadays, slavery is taking place in less obvious ways.

In the foreground, I painted a couple visiting the shop and purchasing products. I chose to give the active role to the man. The woman displays an attitude of ignorance towards what is happening, because she is concerned about the discussion she is having through the headset. In the current society, there is a tendency to give the man a more active role in raising children and for household related chores, to allow women to have a career and to be more independent.

Also, you may notice that the baby in the shopping cart still has the price posted on his back. He has a weird face, but I intentionally painted it in this way. I wanted to emphasize the early maturation of children in the current society. We can often see in advertisements how girls and boys alike are presented in an inappropriate way for their age. For example, girls often wear clothes and makeup specific to adult women. They also might have a hairstyle that matches an adult woman.

The picture has predominantly cold colors, derived from greens and blues. I chose these colors to emphasize the cold nature of people who sell themselves and buy other people, and a certain type of emotional detachment that people have in a consumerist world.

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