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Justin Gignac’s latest Trash Cubes turn the city’s most ordinary leftovers into sealed little monuments to everyday life.
New York has always known how to turn almost anything into mythology. A hot dog wrapper. A coffee cup. A crushed receipt from a corner store at 2am. In the hands of Justin Gignac, even the city’s trash becomes something closer to an artefact.
For the latest edition of his long-running Trash Cubes project, the New York-based artist has turned his attention to one of the city’s most beloved institutions: the bodega. Created with New York City Garbage, the Bodega Edition consists of 100 transparent cubes, each individually numbered and filled by hand with debris collected outside New York bodegas. What might normally be swept away becomes frozen in place, preserved like a tiny urban fossil.
The idea behind Gignac’s project goes back to 2001, when he began collecting rubbish from the streets of Times Square and sealing it inside clear, signed cubes. At first, the gesture was almost a dare: could packaging change the value of something nobody wanted? Could trash become desirable if it was framed, numbered, and presented like an object of design?
More than two decades later, the answer is clearly yes. Over 1,400 Trash Cubes have since travelled to more than 30 countries, shifting the project from conceptual joke to strange, affectionate archive. The work still has humour in it, but also something more tender. Each cube becomes a miniature portrait of the city — anonymous, accidental, and oddly intimate.
The bodega edition sharpens that feeling. In New York, bodegas are more than shops. They are neighbourhood anchors, late-night shelters, unofficial meeting points, and tiny theatres of daily survival. By collecting the traces left outside them, Gignac turns the unnoticed edges of urban life into something worth looking at.
The release also includes a T-shirt and sticker sheet, with the first cubes available in limited quantities online and at the Stanton Street store.
Photography: Tyler Luke / Nate Mumford