A Trek Through Time and “Towards Détournement”

Questioning the reality laid forth by mass media outlets and capitalist ventures is top of the mind in our AI-careening, algorithmic advertising-fed contemporary visual landscape, but, as this exhibit reminds us, it’s hardly anything new. Co-curators Josiah Brown, Amalya Graham, and Eric Petty turn to a Sixties French political theorist, Guy Debord, for artistic centering in “Towards Détournement,” on display at the University of Texas Visual Arts Center through March 14. 

The first-floor exhibit gathers recently created pieces that – as Debord suggested with “détournement” – “hijack” or “reroute” visual messaging through a loosening of form and context and exploitation of trends and tropes, with one eye on the past and another inching toward the future. Through images of their own in a variety of mediums, 15 artists complicate and distort the expected language of well-established visual cues from different historical touchpoints.

Grand, parallel-placed paintings draw a visitor’s eye to the near-center of the T-shaped gallery. In sweeping, contortionist brushstrokes, Josiah Brown and Charlie Mura render the drama of 17th century Baroque paintings fluid and trancelike, replacing precise forms with psychedelic amalgamations of human, animal, and landscape elements. The pigment-rich color palettes, illuminated by diagonal rays of light, deeply root these compositions in a historical moment for even the slightly art history-educated, even without their evocative names (Judgement and The Hunt, respectively). Though distant from a sense of active critique, these pieces showcase the power of popular repetition to cement associations between color, theme, and time in our cultural lexicons and remind us that each successive art movement was one of increasing democratization and expressive freedom. 

Deeper into the gallery, Amalya Graham’s Montage of the Wilderness: Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone pulls these ideas into the modern age in an oil and acrylic painting that resembles a hand-created version of a computer-generated digital collage, like the kind Instagram recently introduced to its Stories platform. Figures appear to glitch and break off into negative space; outlines create contrast and play with juxtaposition; scenes overlap to form a vibrant and cohesive emotion out of incongruent elements. Sidewalk Page Eleven, by Calhan Hale, plays with a similar idea of capturing multimedia feel through painting. These works seem to suggest that digital references and medium hybridization could someday be seen as defining elements of our contemporary aesthetic. 

The Milk Carton Project, rather than address a longstanding medium or period, reimagines the short-lived and oft-remembered public awareness campaign of the Eighties that disproportionately featured white children and succeeded not in reuniting children and families, but proliferating ideas of white victimhood and stranger danger. Artist Olivia Wallace paints her cartons black and affixes Black faces to them, highlighting the disparity in the original campaign and illustrating the pervasive quality of advertisement in everyday objects. 

High above all of these works, like a flag in a high school auditorium, Tiffany K. Smith’s video arrangement, Country, plays on a loop. In B-roll clips from country music videos, form-fitting jeans and Western boots dissolve into trucks splashing through mud and eagles soaring through the pixelated sky, beer bottles and fishing lines, lawns and American flags. Contextless, the images function powerfully as symbols, a looming vision of one version of our country widely spread and recognized even by those with a different experience of American life. There’s nothing remarkable about the branded, commodified objects that appear again and again in these videos, except that their close association with lifestyle, musical genre, and, to a certain degree, politics, has made them a visual cultural shorthand.

Clothing and logos, upholstery patterns, and even camera quality receive a similar treatment in other included pieces, playing on symbols and colors of popular culture to cross over historical periods – as in Chloe Pruett’s portrait of a Nineties living room, Terminator Baby – or playfully critiquing label-loving consumerism, as in Ariana Kimball’s No Gaze Y2K clothing line. The subverted norms and overlapping styles create compelling pieces that provoke questions about who benefits from trends, campaigns, and popularity, leaving the viewer to decide how deeply that critique can cut.

This article appears in February 13 • 2026.