“Thieves Like Us” is a self-initiated project which explores images of youth glamorized by the media.
This catalog is an attempt to display the ambiguous emotional phases of identity; through formally similar, yet contextually separate visual juxtapositions of images “stolen” from the pages of magazines, stills captured from cinema, and song titles appropriated from pop music. It reveals the insistence American culture has placed upon courting, idealizing and mythifying the mysteriously volatile attitudes and emotional symbols attributed to youth, while commodifying, packaging and transmitting them as socially desirable and culturally seductive adult values.
“Thieves Like Us” ultimately functions as an attempt to consider some of the questions prompted by the post-modern era, where vague notions of identity, authenticity, and authorship are problematic, and might be replaced by such terms as pastiche, artificiality, and simulation.
Art direction and design by Vida Sacic and Jonathan McGlothin. Images shown by Matt Jones, Raf Simons and David Sims, Martine Houghton, Elaine Constantine, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott