BrandHouse

BrandHouse explores the dark reality of what is lost when we use brands and social media to express our identities.

 The work is created from hundreds of “brand selfies,” a trend that was discovered when 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 inked archival pigment 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 (McDonalds). The same images are washed with a deep black ink, both obscuring and highlighting the images underneath.

The inked brand-focused selfies create a ghostly inversion of the selfie, similar to the metallic qualities of a daguerreotype. The unique ink creates different tonalities in the work – as you move around the piece the selfies 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 is perhaps the most curated message of all – a gap between the message that is authentically you and what the marketer represents.