Since August 2017, Elizabeth Moran has been mining TIME’s corporate archives to learn more about the history of fact checking. TIME’s founders created the profession in 1923. As the first weekly news magazine in the United States, TIME served as an aggregator culling stories from some 300 newspapers. Early text-only advertisements for subscriptions to TIME present the publication’s innovation, fact-checked information as a commercial product to be bought and sold. The language regularly relied on absurd metaphors—like catching 100 baseballs at once with a 7-bushel crab net—and often referenced Homer’s Iliad—like cutting the Gordian knot to reveal its core strands—to describe their product and the work done by the team of fact-checkers. Moran is presently building a series of nonsensical tableaus inspired by each advertisement and photographing each composition creating a series of confusing images that together visualize and advertise the absurd benefits of fact-checked information.
Elizabeth Moran (b. 1984, Houston) received her MFA from California College of the Arts. Her solo exhibitions include Black Crown Gallery and NYU’s Gulf and Western Gallery. Group exhibitions include The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Wattis Institute.