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Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Jack Carden says he has only made five cents from TikTok, but his online fame has seen him sell pieces for thousands of dollars.
A TikTok video made by a Christchurch-based artist who took a shopping trolley on an epic journey from a supermarket car park to the forests and snowy mountain peaks of the South Island has gone viral, attracting millions of views in just a few days.
Jack Carden said the idea for the video, which has been watched over 2 million times on TikTok and Instagram, came to him in a dream.
“I woke up and I just knew it would be a great video,” he said.
“It was a dream about pushing a trolley around the world.”
That same morning, he took an abandoned shopping trolley from his street, bundled it into his car and set off across the South Island to film himself pushing it across many different landscapes.
The video starts in the car park of a Christchurch Warehouse branch before heading across fields, down dirt tracks, through forests, along beaches and eventually atop a snow capped peak near Mt Hutt. The video is accompanied by narration explaining that returning a shopping trolley is the ultimate test of whether someone is a good citizen.
In keeping with the spirit of the narration, Carden eventually returns the shopping trolley after its fantastic voyage.
Carden, who was born and raised in Auckland, said it took two days to film the elaborate video. He edited on the morning of the third day and had it posted by lunchtime. Two days later it had millions of views.
It was much harder than he thought to push the trolley across such diverse landscapes.
“I took it up Mt Hutt, which was quite a mission. We had some white-out snow storms and some funny looks.
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Anti-artist Jack Carden has 700k followers on TikTok and has used the platform to break into the fine arts world.
“We wanted Lord of the Rings and Mordor vibes.
“In the snow the trolley wouldn’t move at all. On gravel, rocks would get stuck in the wheels.
“I struggle pushing a trolley around the supermarket and this was significantly harder than that. It had a bung front wheel, which made it much more difficult.”
But the artist, who is in his fourth year of a fine art course at the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, is no stranger to TikTok success. He has posted many innovative and surprising videos on the social media channel that have attracted over a million views. Two of his videos are closing in on 12 million views each.
Jack Carden/Supplied
Carden has gone viral with a video of an epic trolley dash to a snow-capped mountain peak.
He joined TikTok in 2020, with his first video posted during the Covid lockdown getting about 500,000 views.
He has used the social media site as a launch pad for a career in fine arts. Earlier this year, he held two exhibitions of his paintings – many of which are created on camera for his videos – in New York and Los Angeles. He eventually sold his artworks for between $8000 and $41,000 each.
“Video is a means of being an artist.
“Having a large platform has allowed me to meet the right people and get into the right conversations.
“It’s a unique situation to be in when you are living in a student flat in Christchurch.”
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