Tanner America

The number of Mommy Bloggers in the world is fully breathtaking. For each 20-something hipster with an artsy minimalist Tumblr, there are a dozen Midwestern housewives boasting visually baroque blogs, brimming with snapshots of their children at the beach and essay-length anecdotes about grocery shopping and lactation. Kids say the darndest things, parenthood is like riding a bicycle with no handlebars, and here are the consumer goods I use.

Many successful Mommies are straight-up hustlers, their sites weaving in sponsored product reviews of the Dove’s new body wash and banner ads for Kitchenaid appliances between intimate missives on the tribulations of home-schooling and up-to-the-minute news on their bathroom remodels. These micro-micro-ad buys from multi-national conglomerates blend in with personal ephemera in a way that feels both unsettling and oddly natural, like of course this is where the Internet is taking us, of course.

In an era where the American Dream means living your life in public (and getting paid to do it), housewives are more than just the target demographic for consumer goods, they’ve also become active participants in their marketing. As this power dynamic shifts, products take on a new relationship with the physical space of our everyday lives, and suburban homes become Hollywood soundstages ripe for the hawking of everything from Jif to Snuggles.

That’s kind of what the fabulous art project Tanner America is about. It’s a satirical blog comprised of Photoshopped approximations of normal American life, seen through the eyes of the eerily gung-ho Tanner family of Colorado Springs. Through bizarrely mundane yet obviously simulated snapshots and hilarious matter-of-fact captions, Tanner America produces an uncanny sense of unease towards the everyday, like a Web 2.0 Twin Peaks. Incidentally, the Tanners nonchalantly report the overtly Lynchian discovery of a dismembered ear in the nearby woods. Go loseWeight Exercise yourself down the rabbit hole, and don’t miss Jacob Gaboury of Rhizome’s insightful commentary on Tanner America.