Exhibition Text
Title: Indistinguishable
Medium: Digital Art and Photo Manipulation Size: Date: September 2022 |
Indistinguishable is a digital manipulation of photos and drawn elements on Procreate and was inspired by Make Art Not War by Shepard Fairey; a spin-off of the anti-war phrase, "Make Love, Not War" that began in the sixties. The particular poster was created in protest of the war against Iraq. I have one of their posters in my bedroom, and I recently rediscovered some of the signs I had used in the MarchForOurLives campaign that followed the Parkland shootings.
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Inspiration
"Maite found the sneakers while the two were out shopping, something her mom said was turning into a new activity they would bond through.
'We were at a local shoe store here and she wanted Converse," Rodriguez recalled. "She saw at the bottom shelf these lime green Converse and they were on sale, so she said, 'Look mama, look at these shoes. I found Converse,' and I said, 'Well let's see if they're your size,' and they were her size. They were her exact size.' Two days later, Rodriguez said she saw her daughter sporting a freshly drawn heart on the toe. 'I said "Maite, why did you draw a heart on your shoes? I just got those for you," and she goes, "Just because I really like them,"' she said. The heart, Rodriguez feels, is a testament to Maite's sweet nature. 'She was just an all-around sweet girl. My sweet girl, that's what I called her – my sweet girl,' Rodriguez said. 'She was smart, beautiful and best-of-all she was my best friend, and I don't exaggerate on that. She was my best friend. We went everywhere together.' Together they planned to visit Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Maite's dream school where she hoped to become a marine biologist. 'It started in kindergarten. She couldn't even say marine biologist yet… I thought with time she's going to change her mind; she's going to want to be a nurse or something when she gets older. Well, she never changed her mind,' Rodriguez said. 'I wanted to keep encouraging her, you know, maybe if she saw the college or the university, the ocean – it would just keep driving her even harder.'" Her obituary stated; Maite was a sweet girl and those who know and loved her were blessed with her kind, ambitious, friendly and sweet soul. She was an AB honor student who enjoyed learning about animals and the ocean; especially dolphins, whales, and dogs. She dreamt of attending The University of Texas A&M in Corpus Christi to become a Marine Biologist because of her caring heart towards wildlife and the animals within it. |
She wore the green high-tops with a heart because they represented her love of all things nature. When getting them, she had no idea it would be her family's only source of identification, or that it would become a massive symbol following her death. The memory of her sweetness, her ambition, and her dreams helped to spur on more calls for action. Her simple sneakers are a reminder of her humanity and personhood-that she loved the color green, shopping with her mom, watching Attack on Titan, jalapeños on her burgers, gym class, and getting good grades. It's a heavy reminder of all the life she had left to live before it was stolen away from her. Gun control has been called for again and again, with little-to-no change due to the sponsorship of gun lobbyists and supporters of politicians.
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I cried for the children murdered in Uvalde. Hearing their stories and seeing their young faces, the clips from security and watching a young father sob to a reporter that he just wanted his child back broke my heart. And perhaps it was Maite's love of nature and dreams of becoming a marine biologist, her interest in one of my favorite shows or the sharp life in her eyes that made her stick out to me, but I decided to use her symbol in this project to showcase the brutality of gun violence in America. She is just one of thousands who have been killed-leaving children the highest population to be killed by firearms above police and military personnel. I have noticed that the victims of these kinds of attacks are reduced to simple casualties or a statistic, while the murderer becomes infamous for their crimes. I believe we should remember the humanity of each and every victim, honor them and their family by showing the same respect we would for our own loved ones. This work is a call for action, so that other little girls like Maite don't have to stare down the barrel of a gun, faced with death before they had gotten to live.
Planning And Experimentation
The first part of planning the piece was to think of ways to incorporate symbols in a way that conveyed a strong message while being pleasant to the eye. This piece utilized much more communication and graphic design than I have done in the past, so going into it I had little experience. I experimented with color scheme, lighting, and format, as well as focusing heavily upon symbolism. Throughout the planning stages, I did research on communicating through font, style, patterns, symbols, and more in a book about illustration. I created the artwork twice, the first serving as my experimentation and the second as the final product.
Process
I scoured the internet for photos, typing in "lime green high top Converse" and AR-15 silhouette. I felt that having a fully detailed gun, along with that of the shoes, would lead to a jumbling piece with difficultly discerning what was what. The green shoes, however, were more vital to distinguish, so I left those alone. Finally, after gathering my two images, I went to google and searches for the number of mass shootings in the United States. What I found was an astronomical number: there was no way I could fit it all into one paper. I did find one article describing their model and standards for what they were considering a deadly mass shooting. This more conservative list came from Mother Jones, which still had a large list, but was more manageable to work with. I copied the spreadsheet into a google document and deleted the spacing between lines and words. I then altered the font to a typewriter typeface, so it would resemble that of a newspaper with breaking news. I also chose a vertical poster, similar to that of a book page, as I felt it would be easier to read the overlaying text if the formatting was similar.
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Once that was ready, I went back to Procreate, applied a background color, inserted the images onto different layers, and erased the backgrounds of the images so it was just the figure itself. I used the color grabber to find the shade of the shoes, then used the color wheel in Procreate to find complimentary, secondary, analogous, and tertiary color pairings. This helped with the color theory in the work and made it more visually pleasing.
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Once the design was completed, with all the colors and such, I decided that the background had too much red/pink in it, so I decided to reduced that to make it more
Reflection and Critique
There are a lot of differences between my final product and the inspiration. The text face is much larger and artistic in nature and is part of the flow for the work. There are more artistic flares overall throughout the image, with a style much more similar to block printing and the printing industry as a whole. Negative space is used to create areas of highlight and the lettering on the poster, with no medium values or shading-though there aren't just huge blocks of black for an entire subject. This is different in mine, where there is no negative space utilized and the shoes are realistic. The large block of black for the silhouette of the gun, shoes, and writing are not artistic in the traditional sense. Furthermore, there is a larger variety of color in my work as opposed to my inspiratoin. overall, his appears more cartoonish and is more or less highly stylized for the function of being a poster. The catchy slogan and iconography make it easy to remember and reproduce.
Resources
https://www.cbsnews.com/dfw/news/mother-uvalde-victim-maite-rodriguez-talks-symbolic-green-converse/