Concerned with the effects of media inundation, Benjamin Moravec questions the socially constructed values and images that permeate contemporary visual culture with his realist oil paintings of family life, pornography, and solitude. Our understanding of these issues, he believes, are increasingly shaped by advertising, the internet, and other elements of “The Media Machine,” rather than our own values and ideals. The media “tries to swallow us when we are young, and impose its opinions on us as we grow older,” Moravec says. Works such as Happy Together / Die Together (2008)—a juxtaposition of two billboards respectively depicting graphic sexuality and a blissful family seemingly on vacation—exemplify the picture-in-picture technique he commonly relies on to add layers of meaning and blur the line between reality and fiction.