2012Mixed Media / Installation
The Unexpected Fall of Celebrity Culture
Ordinary subjects, celebrity masks, Fiverr-written narratives. 2012.
The production method was the concept. Ordinary people were photographed wearing paper cutout masks of celebrities — crude, unrefined, purchased rather than made. Anonymous writers on Fiverr.com were then commissioned to produce fictional narratives for each photograph. The writers received no context: no name, no location, no information about the subject or the project. They produced backstories for faces they could not see, masked by identities they were not told to ignore.
Each photograph was presented with two conflicting narratives — both fictional, both plausible, neither authoritative. The subject of the work is not the person in the photograph. It is the ease with which a narrative attaches to a mask.
The work was made in 2012. At that point the word "influencer" had no professional meaning. The infrastructure now supporting personal brand construction — the ring lights, the content strategies, the algorithmic amplification of performed identity — did not yet exist as an industry. What existed was the underlying logic: that a mask generates more attention than a face, that a story generates more belief than a fact, and that both can be produced at scale without the involvement of the person they describe.
The Fiverr sourcing was not a cost-saving measure. It was a structural statement about the labor economics of narrative. The writers were paid a small fee to produce the fictional identities that completed the work. Their names do not appear. Their authorship is as anonymous as the subjects' faces are obscured. The question of who made this work has four possible answers: the artists, the subjects, the writers, and the platform that connected them. The work does not resolve that question.
Mixed media installation. 2012.
Each photograph was presented with two conflicting narratives — both fictional, both plausible, neither authoritative. The subject of the work is not the person in the photograph. It is the ease with which a narrative attaches to a mask.
The work was made in 2012. At that point the word "influencer" had no professional meaning. The infrastructure now supporting personal brand construction — the ring lights, the content strategies, the algorithmic amplification of performed identity — did not yet exist as an industry. What existed was the underlying logic: that a mask generates more attention than a face, that a story generates more belief than a fact, and that both can be produced at scale without the involvement of the person they describe.
The Fiverr sourcing was not a cost-saving measure. It was a structural statement about the labor economics of narrative. The writers were paid a small fee to produce the fictional identities that completed the work. Their names do not appear. Their authorship is as anonymous as the subjects' faces are obscured. The question of who made this work has four possible answers: the artists, the subjects, the writers, and the platform that connected them. The work does not resolve that question.
Mixed media installation. 2012.