“The most radical statement of my position would be that we are all brutally oppressed by the people who package our fears and sell them back to us. The culture is so permeated with it that it is hard to step back and see that. It isn’t unique to the United States. The difference here is perhaps just that it is so institutionalized, so pervasive and so hard to get people to look at.”


As an artist, my work visually criticizes and satirically emphasizes the stereotypical objectification and commodification of women in our patriarchal and capitalistic society. Through the recycling of mass-media images and commercial advertisement, my work reflects the sexist connotation and institutionally concealed manipulation of women as marketable objects and potential consumers.


To preserve their socio-economic and political power, corporations and institutions employ advertisement as propaganda that inculcates in our society specific and constantly changing standards of beauty and personal value. Ephemeral fashion statements and other means of so called self-expression which are established by the printed and broadcasted media constantly change so female consumers may continuously demand commodities in the never-ending quest for publicly acclaimed perfection and beauty. In the quest for physical perfection and societal acceptance, the result becomes the absence of expressive individual taste and identity.


Like Haacke and Kruger, my art work was also initiated as a reaction to Pop Art and the propagandistic qualities of the capitalistic ideology in the form of advertising. According to Barbara Kruger, she employs images and words because “they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t.” Though I have only directly emphasized the words and language of advertising in one of my video pieces, I also believe that the imagery and vernacular of advertising inculcates ideas and characteristics in the majority of the population, therefore establishing a uniformed partial perspective regarding the current local and global economic, social, and political reality. Thus, my work attempts to reflect to the viewer cultural and societal demonstrations of power, identity, and sexuality.


As Matthew Collings states, the media including films and fashion or commercially related imagery depicting women “just being women” are saturated with connotations and signifiers. Regarding the visual bombardment of advertised imagery, Collings notes how one is not completely aware of how it influences or manipulates us yet it is certain that it does in an infinite yet subtle ways. Through my work, I attempt to convey to the viewer the subtlety of the advertising propaganda and its false propagation or promotion of personal individuality and self expression. I find it crucial for people to become conscious of the system’s cynical, elitist, and self-indulgent motives and actions, in particularly the exploitation of women and their sexuality as an attention-grabber marketable object.


By appropriating publicity images that promote the same product yet of various brands such as sunglasses, I attempt to reflect society’s (in this case with the product or that which can be purchased being life style related opportunities) and the market’s artificial simulation of product variety and therefore of consumer choice. As Barry Hoffman sagaciously states, social institutions and the corporate-managed market both employ advertising as a means to make people feel as if they are exercising their freedom as an individual living in a supposedly democratic society yet encouraging them to make the same life and consumer choices as everyone else.# The repetition of silk-screened images depicting the same object merely worn by a different model due to their seemingly dissimilar styles or brands, convey not only the pretense of product variety but also the uniformity exhibited by the majority of those who unconsciously chose to look and often act like each other hence becoming undistinguishable. Though it results in societal acceptance and often even praise, by purchasing such glamour the only choice the consumer is in fact exercising is becoming as valuable as the product itself: a massively reproduced and thus disposable commodity.


It is not feasible for glamour to exist without personal and social envy being a general and common sentiment. According to Berger, democracy began to flourish as a consequence of the industrialization of society yet was halted half way, generating envy as an essential sentiment experienced and expressed in our time. Though the pursuit of personal happiness has been recognized as a universal right, the existing social, economic, and political conditions force the individual to feel powerless. Therefore most individuals subsist through the paradox between what or how they in fact are and what or how they would prefer to be. For Berger, these individuals have two choices to act upon: Once one becomes conscious to this detrimental paradox and its causes, one may engage in the political struggle for a “full democracy” which implies substituting the present capitalist system for another; or one may continue to be the focus of an envy that once merged with the sensation of powerlessness, “dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.”


As an artist and a socially conscious individual, my intent is to utilize my artwork as a means of encouraging the socio-political consciousness of the public by mirroring the visual propaganda that is constantly being promoted by the profit-orientated ideology of those that manipulate the system. It is crucial for the viewer to recognize that as Berger once again notes, “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy.”# The choices one makes regarding what to eat, wear or drive have replaced our essential political choices and therefore our power and influence. “Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society and it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.”