Department of Art and Art History

Cutting Through Ideology
Reception: April 7, 2026 5-7 pm

We live in a moment where images of crisis are everywhere. News feeds, social media, and digital platforms constantly deliver images of political conflict, environmental disaster, economic inequality, and violence. Because these images appear so frequently, they can begin to lose their impact. Urgency becomes routine, and outrage becomes something we scroll past.

Georgia Phillips’ project begins from that sense of disorientation. She became interested in how the overwhelming flow of images in contemporary media shapes our understanding of politics, truth, and responsibility. Rather than simply illustrating political issues, her work asks a different question: how can artistic form interrupt the ways politics are normally seen and consumed?

To explore this, she draws inspiration from early twentieth-century avant-garde artists such as Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann. Working in moments of political upheaval, these artists used collage, photomontage, and experimental printmaking to break apart familiar images and expose the ideological messages hidden within them. By cutting, rearranging, and fragmenting media imagery, they challenged systems of propaganda and questioned how political meaning is constructed. Rather than producing seamless images like those that circulate online, the work emphasizes the labor of construction and the instability of meaning.

This difference is important. Today we already experience fragmentation through endless scrolling feeds and algorithmic media environments. But that fragmentation often disperses attention rather than encouraging reflection. By contrast, the fragmentation in this work is deliberate and material. It slows perception and invites viewers to pause, look closely, and piece together meaning themselves.

Satire also plays an important role in the project. The work is not about supporting one political side or another. Instead, it examines how ideology, media spectacle, and political messaging operate across the entire landscape of contemporary American politics. Through exaggeration, irony, and unexpected visual combinations, satire helps reveal the contradictions embedded within political rhetoric. Humor becomes a way of creating distance from rigid partisan positions and opening space for critical reflection.

This project is about how we look at images and how images shape the way we think about the world. Fragmentation is not solely a visual style, but a way of encouraging viewers to question what they see. When images are cut apart and reassembled, their meanings are no longer fixed. Viewers must actively interpret them.

In that moment of interpretation, when we pause, question, and reconsider what we are looking at, the possibility emerges for thinking differently about politics, media, and the structures of power that surround us.

Georgia Phillips is a senior double major in art and art history from Winston-Salem, NC.

Artist Instagram: @georgiaphillips.art
Contact: geoeliza@ad.unc.edu

Admission: Free
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 8 am-5 pm