Sidewalk Sale, 2022
Azadeh Shladovsky
Mixed Media
Sidewalk Sale confronts the painful irony at the heart of contemporary Los Angeles: the collision between aspirational luxury and the reality of homelessness. This installation transforms recognizable luxury brand iconography into a meditation on shelter as the ultimate, unattainable luxury for thousands living on our streets.
The shopping cart—the quintessential symbol of both consumer abundance and street survival—becomes a vessel for this contradiction. Modified luxury logos ask us to reconsider what we value: Is a home not the most fundamental luxury? When did the roof over one's head become as distant a dream as a designer handbag?
In Los Angeles, where wealth and deprivation exist in uncomfortable proximity, the shopping cart has become an unofficial symbol of displacement—a mobile storage unit, a barrier against the world, a last possession. By adorning it with the visual language of aspiration and status, Sidewalk Sale reflects the grotesque disparities that have become normalized in our civic landscape. The American Dream, once promised as accessible to all, is revealed as a selective mythology—its bounty visible everywhere yet increasingly out of reach.
This work creates a moment of recognition, asking viewers to sit with the dissonance between the luxury we covet and the luxury we deny.
Azadeh Shladovsky Photographer: John Jefferson, Azadeh Shladovsky
On Site
About the Artist
As a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, papermaking, and time-based media, I explore “visual consciousness”—how, what, and who we see. Rooted in the belief that vision is socially constructed, my work examines the intersections of identity, perception, and power. As an immigrant, I’ve long navigated shifting cultural spaces—a perspective that deepened when my daughter lost her eyesight. That rupture compelled me to reexamine my own ways of seeing. My process is tactile and intuitive, with material acting as a collaborator in exploring the instability of sight. Forms and surfaces become metaphors for the thresholds between visibility and erasure, presence and absence. Through this material language, I question how visibility operates—what is revealed, obscured, or ignored—and how meaning is shaped by what we choose, or are taught, to see.
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