Glasses On – Glasses Off 

This is a miniature diorama based on the newspaper stand scene from John Carpenter’s cult classic "They Live". The film may have come out in the 80s, but with fake news, social media influence, corporate greed, and general uncertainty doing the rounds, it feels uncomfortably relevant.

In the scene, the main character discovers that a pair of glasses lets him see what’s actually going on. Without them, everything looks normal - magazines, newspapers, adverts, all doing their usual thing. With the glasses on, all of that disappears and is replaced by blunt, unsubtle instructions: OBEY, BUY, CONSUME, STAY ASLEEP. No branding, no design, just the message underneath.

I wanted the model to recreate that shift as physically as possible. The whole piece sits on a tiny rotating base with bearings, so as you turn it, you move between the two views.

One side shows the world as it appears... newsstand, customer, nothing out of the ordinary... turn it, and the same scene is stripped back to what’s really there: the messages exposed, and the customer revealed as something a bit less human.

The seller stays the same throughout, but the customer changes from a man in a suit to a blue, skull-faced alien. The newspapers and magazines are all made by hand from scaled-down real covers, with a few hidden references to John Carpenter and his other films worked in. On the reverse, the original content is completely replaced by the not-so-subliminal messages.

The piece is designed to be turned, revealing both versions of the same scene as you move through it. Seeing that shift happen in your hands felt like the right way to approach something built around perception. Glasses on - Glasses off.