Photo Senior, Taylor Freeman, had her Senior Thesis 1, Cereal, be featured at the 2025 VCUarts Undergraduate Juried Exhibition
This exhibition focuses on how the rise of digital culture has grown more nuanced, ever-changing, and omnipresent to serve as a catalyst for cultural production and phenomena. With the url world regularly spilling over and into irl interactions leans into consequential blur between clarity and incoherence, authenticity, and artifice, facts, and total nonsense.
Through her work in this exhibit, Cereal represents how “mass consumerism has become our collective sense of reality” to “refuse the satisfaction of spectacle.” Taylor wants to make the user uncomfortable with things they typically interact with or use a specific way in a way that is inherently wrong to show the disgust of overconsumption. “Twisting the seductive nature of aesthetics, [she emphasized] the fact that our modern lives are full of mass-produced pleasures that crumble as fast as they are created.”