When I made this collage piece, I had been working with vintage ads in collage for a few years. There is something so intensely bizarre about the invitation to a particular kind of middle-class American life these mid-century ads offer to White people, juxtaposed against the open threats those same ads constantly make: If only you used the right mouth wash, soap, deodorant… maybe then someone would love you, you weird loser.

Every ad is both promise and threat. Give us money, and we will fix you. Don’t give us money, and you stay on the fringes.

For a piece about weight loss ads, there’s no shortage of bizarre examples to use in the collage. The two main ads used in this piece are the sheep ad for fleece clothing and the ad for inflatable weight loss shorts—a thing that was too funny not to use. 

My mother always bought the most ridiculous weight loss gadgets when I was a kid, and the shorts reminded me of her. The ovary illustration hints at that memory of her and balances the composition visually. And the old receipts remind us that diet culture is always about money. It’s a blunt statement, but nothing subtle about fatphobia ever seems to land.

The piece is called “I’ve come to burn your kingdom down,” because that is my goal for diet culture in all its forms.