There are thousands of these lying around
Willis Arnold
VideoMay 7th, 2013 - May 18th, 2013
There are thousands of these lying around is an attempt to work the boundaries of intrusion as an organizing principle. Each day we are bombarded by messaging, instructions, and advertisements. No media goes untainted. It is virtually impossible to exist in contemporary American culture without exposing oneself to a barrage of product-based supplications. This product exists. Buy it. Buy it.
This video is an attempt to manifest manufactured insistence simultaneously on visual and aural planes. By collapsing the audio of multiple ads and interjecting original sounds, the work attempts to construct a rhythm that reinterprets these recordings as an artistic product. By situating a product against formal images – a row of potted plants, a row of houses – the piece explores the relationship of definitive product advertisement and the subversive ideological “products” with which we are presented.
There are thousands of these lying around culminates in the intrusion of marketing into the home-space, a personal space, the body into which we continually welcome prescriptive and proscriptive consumer behavior.
About the Artist
Willis Arnold grew up in Minnesota and is now based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a multimedia artist and journalist whose work centers on the integration of personal perception with social cues and visual currency. In his videos, Arnold explores themes of containment, experience, and juxtaposition. He is interested in skewing the details of contemporary life to expose the relationship of the individual to larger environmental matrices. Although language is not present in all of his work, it informs much of the imagery therein.