Over the past 10 years there has been an explosion of storage places built all over Southern California. The Public Storage puzzle is built on the same SOMA model as the Uncrate Puzzle.
“After a monumental building boom, the United States now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space.” (The Self Storage Self, Mooallem)
As we drove through the entry gates of Public Storage with our moving truck we were greeted with row upon rows of orange roll-up garage doors. There seemed no end to the rows of identical orange doors. Occasionally we would drive past an open unit. Each one had variations on the same theme. Boxes stacked neatly in columns, some marked, others left bank. I wondered if the owners even remembered what was in their boxes.
“A 2006 U.C.L.A. study found middle-class families in Los Angeles “battling a nearly universal over accumulation of goods.” Garages were clogged. Toys and outdoor furniture collected in the corners of backyards. “The home-goods storage crisis has reached almost epic proportions,” the authors of the study wrote. A new kind of customer was being propelled, hands full, into self-storage.” (The Self Storage Self, Mooallem)
Our personal experience validated this as fact. Renting a small house meant that if we bought one new thing, something had to go to the garage. The Public Storage puzzle series, invites the viewer to consider the connection between desire, consumption and question why we store things in boxes when we can no longer remember what we put in them.
