Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
Window Dressing is an annual cycle of short-term installations presented in the exterior vitrine of the Cerritos College Art Gallery, curated by gallery director James MacDevitt.
installation view of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
Oxymora consisted of pages from the New York Times on the wall behind vinyl text on the windows. The text comprised both ‘tag lines’ and ‘keywords’ from well known advertising campaigns and a series of oppositional and contradictory statements related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
installation view of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
The newspaper pages on the front wall were all designed in one of two ways: a grid of nine rectangles in three rows of three with the news article in the top center rectangle surrounded by eight equal sized advertisements, as well as a thin article across the top of the page and a long advertisement that dominated the bottom half.
The shorter side wall used a grid of nine pages: five of them in an X pattern were full page advertisements by Philip Morris that questioned anti-smoking laws while the other four in a diamond shape showed examples of a New York Times advertising campaign emphasizing the words TRUTH and FACTS, at least partly in response to frequent lies by then President Trump.
installation view of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
installation view of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
detail of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
installation view of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
"We live in a time of 24-hour cable news channels and social media feeds through which important and mundane events alike are forever flitting by with the flick of a finger. It can be difficult, therefore, to critically unpack all the ways that mediated information is always already coded with the capitalist needs of the corporate institutions that present and filter our understanding of the world around us. In truth, this is nothing new. Traditional print media has long been unsustainable, with more and more page real-estate dedicated to advertisement as a means to compensate for perpetually-shrinking subscriber revenue. Journalistic ethics supposedly guarantee that publications like The New York Times will forever be the trusted archive of historical record, but such grandiose claims fall apart at nearly any level of careful scrutiny.
Brian C. Moss’ Window Dressing installation, Oxymora, serves as a conceptual case study, overlaying tag lines from well-known advertising campaigns onto archival newspaper pages, demonstrating the dichotomy that exists between the needs of a newspaper as a business and the mission of the news industry itself to present the news in a fairly non-biased form. In the newspaper pages on display, the advertisements occupy the vast majority of the surface, with a single news article taking up only a small portion of the remainder of the design. So many questions arise. What is objectivity and to what degree is it even possible? Whom do we trust and why? Tracing the institutional relationships between advertisement and news reveals another dilemma, however, they both similarly employ text and images to make meaning, so how can they ever be differentiated. While one requires truthfulness and objectivity, the other is designed to persuade, and even mislead, on behalf of a capitalist desire to sell a product. (When) does the ad subvert the goal(s) of the newspaper? Can the language of advertising be seen with fresh eyes (beyond its context)? With Buzzfeed lists masquerading as newsworthy articles and sponsored imagery dominating Instagram posts, these questions are more relevant than ever, making an installation assembled from dusty old newspapers particularly new and exciting, if only we could slow down long enough to take a good look."
James MacDevitt, Director/Curator, Cerritos College Art Gallery
installation view of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
detail of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable
installation view of Oxymora, 2022, newspaper, vinyl, dimensions variable