With everything that's going on in the world recently, I've been thinking a lot about privilege. As someone who has experienced a lot of privilege, I'm not sure how to speak out about all of the innocent men that are dying. I'm not even sure it's my place to. But I am trying to find ways to say something without being insensitive, ignorant, pedantic or heavy handed. I think new media is a good medium in which to explore these topics.
With Photoshop and Brushes you can work with actual images from the news to create a collage to express what you're trying to say. I created this piece after seeing this article floating around. When asked to name a celebrity that represented the ideal form, all survey respondents picked white people. It happened again in this survey conducted by Samsung and these digital renderings of ideal male bodies over time. To me, these surveys illustrate one of the many ways unconscious bias trickles into all of our decision making. I took the ideal male form from the first article and used it as a basis for my central figure. I wanted to take this 'beauty' and show how ugly he really could be. I stood him on top of a pile of American bison skulls. This image of skulls is from the mid-1870s when white men attempted to eradicate the Plains Indian Tribes by killing all of the bison, thus making their main source of food extinct. Behind it all, Trump's face smirks down on the scene, representing the ultimate privileged white male.
You capture the heart of art making: allowing us to explore topics of deep concern in a way that verbal language may not match easily. It's one of the course goals: to make students learn to understand new media are just as equally suited to art making than more traditional forms of media.
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