International Brand Expansion
Digital prints on fabric, digital images and GIFs
2015

The exhibition follows a narrative of the Tough Guy Mountain corporation: Tough Guy Mountain New Media Business Art Collective presents their International Brand Expansion showroom, a re-visionary collaboration between the consumer and their digital destination. Tough Guy Mountain appreciates the beauty that lies in the future, present, and the presented. Using the perception of tourist destinations constructed from online search engines, consumers relate to a familiar, blog-friendly aesthetic of these cultural centers. Relying completely on the ideal these centers present online, TGM integrates their own cultural capital and logo into these historic locals. IBE reduces the identities of political entities through a process of branding, thereby making them easier to subsume into tough guy mountains brand. Repurposing trendy graphics and slogans into work designated for documentation comfortably reminds the audience of gallery documentation that defines many contemporary exhibitions. IBE exists stronger as its subsequent self, as another image in a saturated culture. The work was displayed physically and online at the 100percentreal Pavilion at the 2015 Digital Art Biennale. Images of the work were then the opening section in the weekly newsletter of Canadian Art, Canada's leading arts publication.