MEMENTO MORE:  REMEMBER YOU ARE CONSUMER

Art imitates life.  Ads imitate art.  Life imitates ads.  And around again, in a monstrous cycle of disposability, and kitsch recollection.  I've never been able to understand how artists can work all day and create all night, and not countenance some bleed between their disciplines: some semblance of mutual influence, some reaction - positive, negative, anything.  For the last two decades I've been paying bills by working in the advertising industry, and for the last four decades I've lived and raised a family in this media-saturated, 24/7 ad-fest we call World. In that time I've become fascinated by the ephemeral nature of the products I've sold, and the products I've bought, and the dreams of eternality and immortality inherent in the fashioning, and enframing, of beauty, and truth.  My practice, then, has progressed from photographing shredded advertising posters on city scaffolding and walls, to systematically decollaging in situ street advertising posters–a form of Semiotic Archaeology–to uncover hidden meanings and hermetic truths.   I’ve recombined appropriated images and logos from print and online media in the interest of candor.  I've fabricated skeletons out of logos, fashioning mascots of the ways not just our minds but our bodies too have been proprietized.  I've combined found objects - rusted scrap metal, dental impressions, discarded technology, natural detritus and brand iconography - into immersive environments - commercespheres - in which the audience itself becomes the installation: an entity to be demographically parsed.  Advertising "culture" is everywhere, everywhen, and yet because each signifying campaign is not intended to outlast its signified, its vocabularies, tools, and artifacts must be perpetually renewed.  It's that in-wired obsolescence, and that insatiable appetite, I seek to address - or, perhaps, I'm hoping merely to show the scars of my collaboration with madness.

- Ahron D. Weiner