Subversive Advertising
February 1st, 2009. Categories: Student Art.Fall 2005
The prompt for this assignment was to critique social media. I’m not the hugest fan of the “social fill-in-the-blank parody or critique” type of assignments, since almost every art class I’ve been in has had a variation of this project, but in the end I was very happy with how my pieces turned out. To put my personal spin on it, I made my series of three images into a sequential narrative.
The first ad depicts our couple meeting for the first time over a Jack Daniels. Alcohol advertisements always go for the feel-good.
The second ad lampoons high fashion, in the style of Georgio Armani. The couple has apparently been together quite some time, but things are not so harmonious now… It was always amusing to me how the models in fashion ads seemed really unhappy to be there, and I tried to reflect that on the characters’ faces.
The last ad is for Prozac. The implication is that the relationship is now over after some long, hard times, and our leading lady is now ready to take back her life.
One of the things that set me apart from my classmates was my then-developing lineless coloring style. I was one of the few people who did not manipulate existing images for this assignment, save for the Jack Daniels bottle and the Prozac logo.
The characters in these ads are loosely based on characters I created for a superhero story called The Hues, but this narrative does not occur within the story’s universe.
