The Branding series utilizes hundreds of corporate brand names and logos to evoke the omnipresence of brand identity and the supersaturation of media advertising in our culture. These visual elements are dispersed across the teaming surface of the paintings in a dynamic way that suggests a universe of online commerce.
To create the paintings, I hacked a program intended for use by sign painters and altered it to produce the extreme perspectival distortions that give the logos an illusion of movement through the “space” of the painting. Interestingly, contemporary electronic consumer culture is evoked through the use of one of the most ancient forms of advertising, sign painting.
A subset of the Branding series is a group of paintings in which the brands used by a particular individual are accumulated within one painting and serve as a kind of portrait of that individual. This reflects the larger social use of specific brands to both project a desired image to others and to shape one’s identity.