Artist Spends 9 Years Using FedEx To Ship Glass Boxes To Create Shattered Sculptures

If you’re wondering how much carriers care about the safety of your shipment, then you have to see this brilliant experiment by LA-based Walead Beshty. During a 9 year period, Beshty has been creating laminate glass objects which perfectly fit inside FedEx boxes and shipping them to various galleries and exhibitions in order to explore how works of art gather “fingerprints”.

h/t: boredpanda, colossal

“I was interested in how art objects acquire meaning through their context and through travel,” Beshty said in an interview with Mikkel Carl. “I wanted to make a work that was specifically organized around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another.”

Through an ordinary shipment, Walead’s pieces would inevitably crack. The curators of the galleries and exhibitions would then have to meticulously remove them for display. Each one was named after the date, tracking number, and box size of the particular shipment.