Well, it’s been a while. Having had to take some time away from the updates due to my Master’s dissertation I’m feeling rusty returning to feature writing on the pick for SOTW but if the writing fails the images of this week’s chosen artist certainly will compensate. I’ve been watching @sampicturesnyc feed for some time since he began sending images to #thehashtagofman but it’s the ‘advertisement’ portraits that really caught my interest. In these topsy turvy global economic times, where it seems (well for me anyways) capitalism is a drip feed of economic glucose, keeping us on a sugar high so we miss the inverted corruption of our gamified reality – @sampicturesnyc says it all with this project. His despondent subjects all appear with a point of purchase advertisement as a backdrop while riding the New York subway. He creates this dually layered visual inflection which tugs at the eye – is this an ad within an ad? His subjects are all exhausted (or lost) and the obnoxious display of the ads behind show this unrelenting push of the capitalist selling machine – buy, try, watch, use, be, own, insure, protect, more, new, everything you want! These isolated subjects are trapped within his framing, stuck in an ongoing noise of this always forward moving nowness. These explicit message he creates through his juxtapositions lead me to pause and hear a conversation going on between us and the mechanisms at work. Embedded in what seems too many spaces is a never ceasing push of the hard sell. Well worth a visit and see what feelings they conjure up for yourself.

@sampicturesnyc