Kraft Singles American pasteurized prepared cheese product, spray paint, adhesive
Undergraduate
Referencing the portraiture of celebrity photographer Platon, this work reinterprets his images of contemporary autocratic world leaders by stenciling them onto slices of Kraft Singles. Despite being marketed as 'American cheese', the Kraft product is legally distinct from actual cheese, classified instead as a 'pasteurized prepared cheese product.' Just as the celebrity culture apparatus carefully cultivates images of these leaders, obscuring both the image and the reality of their rule, so too does the food conglomerate use branding to obfuscate the true nature of its product. The juxtaposition of these two forms of artifice interrogates what is lost in the space between the Sign and its Symbol, representation and reality.
