As a society, we are endlessly confronted with advertisements, images, and information that we mindlessly consume without true appreciation for the messages these stimuli intend to convey. My project, Intersections, juxtaposes images of everyday objects with various texts collected from ads, news articles, slogans, social media, commercials, and movies in order to critique the image-text relationship in advertising and popular culture. I began this project intending to explore the relationship between random gender specific and gender neutral products and random advertisement slogans with the objective of keeping the image-text relationship arbitrary. However, during the process, I once again became overwhelmingly aware of the distinct, complex, relationship between marketing and gender that I ultimately felt compelled to choose copy text that made a statement about advertising and the way in which messages are conveyed and meaning is created. Each of my photographs serves to critique and satirize the verbal and visual messages – specifically, those related to gender, sexuality, stereotypes, and beauty standards. By contrasting these different, even random, images and texts, I aim to challenge the complicated nature between images and text in the formation of meaning that exists not only within advertising, but also in art, entertainment, social media and all forms of visual culture.

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