The title of Roe Ethridge’s 2014 still-life photograph, Celine Bracelet for “Gentlewoman,” peels back the curtain, letting the viewer know that this is a magazine advertisement for a luxury brand. The photograph occupies two worlds: art and advertising. Similarly, the content of the photograph ranges from real to fake. A marble pear reverberates against the marble veneer backdrop and anchors the still life, which is dominated by grapes made of rubber with plastic leaves—materials often used in commercial food photography because they can withstand the hot lights of a set.

Christmas Gifts was the opening image of an editorial spread on gift giving published in the 1936 December issue of House Beautiful. In the early twentieth century, the type of modernist photography aesthetic practiced by Paul Outerbridge Jr.—which emphasized patterning and a tight crop—was actively promoted by magazine editors, including Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair from 1914 to 1936. The public’s positive response to these high-style, artistic images served to popularize the trend.

Inspired by semiotics, psychoanalysis, and film studies, Victor Burgin combines found advertisements with his own writing to examine the difference between implicit and explicit meaning. In US77 he appropriates the look and language of advertising, fusing his own social documentary-style photographs with extended prose in the form of captions presented as oversized posters adhered directly to the wall.

Urs Fischer’s Fritz Lang/Shorty is a precise grouping of mirror boxes depicting two oversized ducklings and two empty shopping carts; the work is seamlessly manufactured without a trace of the artist’s hand. It is slick, shiny, and cute—granting it ultimate commodity appeal. The reflections of the four mirror boxes incorporate the surrounding gallery space, and viewers are compressed into the visual space of the shopping carts. Everything is consumable, ready to be pushed to the cash register, purchased, and taken home.

In Autopoetics and Wire, Carter Mull brings together a montage of found images that reflect contemporary American culture and art. These include four reproductions of the poster promoting the 2000 movie Pollock, about Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. Although the background is bleached out in these negative versions, Ed Harris as Pollock is shown in front of one of his paintings while he works on another set up on the floor.

Barbara Kruger uses bold text, often in combination with highly graphic images, to create open-ended messages with social and political implications. Her use of “you” addresses the viewer directly, while her inclusion of the pronouns “I” and “we” suggests a dialogue with an unspecified authority. Composed of three panels, Untitled (You substantiate our horror) is a unique oversized gelatin silver print encased in a red frame. This work defied the norms of 1980s art photography, which largely consisted of intimate black-and-white images matted and framed in black.

Sanja Iveković was a pioneering figure within the Yugoslavian feminist movement of the 1970s. Her work in photomontage, video, and performance explores the role of women in society, using her own life and history as source material. Iveković’s series GEN XX comprises six black-and-white photographs of women, all but one appropriated from advertisements, and replaces the text, slogans, and product references with the names of anti-fascist, female resistance fighters from Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

In the mid-1970s Mitchell Syrop began to combine image and text to make short films and photographs, often in series or grids. In these works he also capitalized on neutral, open-ended advertising slogans, colloquial expressions, everyday clichés, and Bible references, which he formatted according to American typographic conventions. When considered together, the phrases “Watch It” and “Think It” take on an overbearing tone.

Silvia Kolbowski attributes her ongoing interest in language to her uncompromising immersion in English at age six after she moved with her family from Buenos Aires to New York. Her work draws on theory—including feminism and psychoanalysis—as well as appropriation and the tradition of overtly political British photo-text work. Between 1982 and 1984 Kolbowski created eight multi-image artworks for her series Model Pleasure. In them, she interspersed text with images to suggest that every component, whether image or text, should be read.

Cofounded by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver in 1989, Adbusters pioneered the phenomenon of “culture jamming,” in which the techniques of conventional print advertising are used to critique, subvert, and challenge the hegemony of large corporations. It features often-disturbing spoof ads alongside left-leaning articles on a wide range of political and social issues—including animal rights, climate change, and nuclear proliferation—and regularly solicits submissions and ideas from its readers.