BrandHouse examines how brands are used to construct identity and self-representation on social media.

The work is created from hundreds of “brand selfies,” a trend discovered while hand sorting thousands of images from over 10 million selfies pulled from the web. Selfie takers hold up the same products over and over again in their photos, using the brand’s messaging already alive in the popular imagination to represent themselves. They are, in part, taking ownership of the brand, but what about us is lost when we use signs and symbols from advertisers and corporations to represent ourselves?

BrandHouse consists of three large-scale screen prints each comprised of thousands of full-color selfies of people posing with their favorite consumer products. The work is named after the brands’ advertising slogans, #doubletheyou (Starbucks), #haveacokeandasmile (Coke), and #imlovingit (McDonald’s). The same images are washed with deep black and metallic inks, simultaneously obscuring and revealing the images underneath.

The inked brand-focused selfies create a ghostly inversion of the selfie, similar to the reflective qualities of a daguerreotype. As viewers move around the work, the images appear and then fade away.

Fundamentally, selfies are a curated version of ourselves, each image carefully composed to represent the “me” we want to show the world. But in real life, we are complex and un-curated. Using brands may be the most curated message of all — collapsing the space between authentic identity and the language of advertising.