Louis Croudace

Whenever I tune in to the radio, turn on the tv to watch the news, or pick up my phone I feel the subtle yet powerful influence of news media and advertising. The concept behind “Add to Cart” is to expose the enabling forces present in online advertising through a dark and surreal personification of the media. I wanted to create an entity in my artwork that brings the audience’s focus to a singularity. An entity that embodies the media itself and doesn't just idolize it. It is intended to be dark, creepy, and off-putting, to induce fear in the audience. However, I also wanted to integrate a nostalgic irony of pop art into the structure of the work and why I'm thinking of also including a pop art style background.

This borderline between pop art and dark abstractions throughout the background is an indicator of the bipolar personality of the media. The foreground will focus on the entity. For this, I will engage the audience by morphing the physical form into the background's dark areas. The pop art areas of the background use integrated symbolism with different signs and symbols, each idolizing an aspect of the media. The entity is to be a demonic, skeletal figure.

As for reference for the artwork, I'll use the reference of vintage and retro media outlets (maybe input devices as well), the art style will integrate an early-mid 20^th-century style for the pop-art and a renaissance style for the dark forms and abstractions in the work.