Dark (Printed) Matter
Minerva Cuevas
This book is a selection of advertisements from various international magazines published between 1940 and 1970. I have collected these in tandem with my aesthetic work regarding the oil industry and its social impact.
When viewing these ads, we realize they reveal something not only about the political, social, and economic shifts throughout history but also about ourselves: we have changed, both as individuals and as a society. While we now view these advertisements through a vastly different lens—so different, in fact, that we may even doubt their authenticity—they also suggest that perhaps, driven by the immediacy demanded by late capitalism, we have avoided looking back at the origins of war culture or the way the notion of democracy has been instrumentalized by corporate interests.