Repurposed Item

 

  Not Just a Cup of Joe

by Morgan Braun

The idea behind this piece of work stems from the everyday routine; my use of an average Starbucks coffee container came from the repeated sightings of this object daily. The transformation of this simple object took some pondering to find an alteration with real meaning behind it.            

The uses of antiviral drugs have proven to be very effective in cases of HIV/Aids, when I thought about developing countries struggling with devastating diseases like HIV I came to the realization that a $4 cup of Starbucks a day can really add up, but to what? An addiction to caffeine and sugar, what if that $112 a month were used towards a cause; healthcare. This issue of a lack of proper healthcare growing concern as I learn of more preventable diseases wiping out cultures around the world.

I created a representation of a larger than life prescription bottle to represent the tremendous amount of aid that could be used to fund healthcare in developing countries for just the sacrifice of a cup of coffee a day. To do this I stopped by many Starbucks locations and asked for empty cups to create an art project, to my surprise the employees were rather thrilled to hand over merchandise for an art project. The entire work is made from Starbucks materials, the use of a paper bag with a large logo is used as the prescription label, the bottoms of the cups were used to created representations of pills settling at the base of the container, the repetition of logos as the bottle itself helps create visual effect of showing what is consumed in an extended amount of time to consumers, and the lid was created from order blocks located on the sides of the cups. I hope to do more work of this nature, focusing on main steam global issues.