Caitlin Owens

Caitlin Owens

ADJACENT ATTRACTION AND THE SALABLE IDENTITY

I seek to bring attention to the ubiquitous role that corporate advertising has taken on in our culture. This constant and often inescapable barrage of commercial messages that we receive perpetuates the ideas that a person's identity is hinged on that which he or she consumes. We have learned to brand ourselves, and these advertisements serve as catalogues for our identities. Through this project, I hope to expose and draw attention to contemporary marketing devices as tools that promote our intense reliance on consumerism as a means for crafting an identity. I've attempted to highlight some of the mechanics of magazine advertising by setting up new relationships between individual images and their respective products. These images often appeal more to values and prospective identity markers than the commodities themselves. I also used the grid formation in order to explore the relationships between types of products and the "identity" or "image" categories used to sell them. This project ultimately served as both a personal exploration into my understanding of the imagery used in advertising and an opportunity for viewers to find onnections (or conflicts) in their own.