Virginia Fleck
2007 Biennial Talk
Run Time: 9:32
In a way, this desperate need among advertisers to “divine” our intimate truths has indelibly linked consumerism to culture. Now there’s hardly time to discover and explore a new experience or a new approach to living without also considering the new line of products, technologies, or services that has been tailored to that discovery. Life is being captured, repackaged, and sold back to us as quickly as we live it.
Gina Piccalo, Los Angeles Times
Currently, I am working on a series of wall-sized meditation mandalas constructed from plastic shopping bags, gathered during summers with my family in Maine. While continuing the mandalic traditions of repetitive design and meditative intention, my choice of material imbues these mandalas with a contemporary narrative.
The logos, slogans, and pantone promises on shopping bags are the result of exhaustive market research by advertisers. We are monitored, manipulated, and seduced by marketing campaigns designed to appeal to our conceits as consumers. I am re-scripting these consumer messages into a critique of their original purpose; seducing the masses into unconscious patterns of consumer excess.
Initially, the relentlessly cheerful facades of these jewel-toned confections appear to be manic meditations on cultural iconography. Upon further investigation, the viewer sees past the sugar coating of happy faces and glib slogans that are hawking the American Dream and spinning the promise of redemption through consumerism.