Cheaper Than Groceries depicts a glitched portrait of a woman in a grocery store, caught mid-bite as she eats dollar bills. The digital distortion fractures her face and body into unstable bands of color and noise, as if the image itself is failing under the strain of the scene. The glitch functions as both aesthetic and diagnosis: a visual language of breakdown, compression, and system error.

Around her, shelves and displays overflow with food she cannot afford. Abundance becomes a taunt rather than a resource, transforming the grocery store into a showroom of exclusion. The act of consuming money is absurd on its surface, yet painfully logical within the work’s premise: when the currency meant to secure survival is insufficient, the only thing left to ingest is the symbol of value itself. The dollar bill becomes a substitute for nourishment, a bitter commentary on how financial systems can demand sacrifice without providing sustenance.

By placing the figure in a space designed for choice, the piece highlights the violence of constrained options. Cheaper Than Groceries critiques inflation, wage stagnation, and the psychological toll of living inside a marketplace where necessity is priced like luxury. The woman’s glitched presence suggests an identity eroded by constant calculation, where hunger is not only physical but structural, and the cost of living is measured in what must be swallowed to endure.