Exhibitions

How much of what we believe to be our own desires was placed there by someone else?

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Through a panoramic photograph of Monument Valley fragmented into eight individual works, The Freedom We Were Sold returns to a landscape that has long existed beyond the land itself.

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For decades, this landscape appeared across advertisements, magazines, television screens, and cinema. It became a symbol of freedom, independence, and the life people imagined for themselves. One of its most recognisable expressions is the Marlboro campaign, which transformed the American West into an image recognised around the world.

But what did the audience really see within that image?

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A cigarette?

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A cowboy?

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Or a version of themselves?

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The Freedom We Were Sold considers how images become symbols, how symbols become desires, and how certain ideas become so familiar that we begin to mistake them for our own.

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— COTH x Ssamssik