HILTON OWEN

‘Products are made in factories but brands are made in the mind.’
- Walter Landor, founder of Landor Branding Agency

If brands are made in our minds they are therefore a part of us. They are created by external institutions (corporations and advertisers) that are then propelled by mass media to reach desired audiences. Brands become part of us, and we become part of the brands. We define our very lives from this process, and virtually everything is branded. And they are ‘made in the mind’, something well known by all advertising agencies and corporations.

These brands are not real – we have created them. Yet just how real they have become is something worth examining. Are these brands promoting and allowing for sincere identities? Do they encompass real values? Or are they illusionary entities created primarily to sustain the modern capitalist lifestyle of self -absorption, consumption and growth?

Everything is branded. Everything we buy, everything we see and everything we use manifest together to create us as a whole.

But what exactly is ‘us’ anyway? Do we ever stop to ask this question?

‘We send ethnographers into homes to observe consumers in their natural environment.’
- Todd Sampson, CEO Leo Burnett Australia

We are not just people living in our homes, but rather consumers observed in our natural environments. Throughout all media and corporate institutions people are referred to as ‘consumers’. And I guess that is about right. We’re living, moving platforms used to feed a hunger.

But our appetites, as we are coming to realise, are at the expense of environmental, economic and moral issues. (Global warming, the financial crash, and child labor are examples for each.)

The paintings around you are here in their ‘natural environment’ for you to ‘observe’.

- Hilton Owen, 2010