Many of my projects are one off posters that are either avenues of self expression or mechanisms through which I comment on socio-political issues in the world today. I often take an experimental approach to my posters and let them come together after trying out many options. This usually involves photographing and rephotographing objects or people and layering them in photoshop. Whatever the process may be, these posters are an extension of my voice.
Overload
Overload seeks to express the experience of being overwhelmed by the stimuli that flood out brain everyday, specifically as it pertains to Covid-19 and the college student. The messages we receive may be true or beneficial, but they lose meaning after being drilled in your head for months on end.
Photo Direction
I called in a good friend of mine and asked him to give me expressions of distraught. I asked him to imagine the experience of being overwhelmed and also had him scream. The resulting images were meshed together using masking and blending modes.
Protect
the innocent
Protect the Innocent is a set of two posters that were created in response to Exodus Cry’s ArtXFreedom campaign that encouraged creatives to make art calling out organizations like Mindgeek and Pornhub for the ways they fail to regulate and stand against child abuse and human trafficking. I wanted to create posters that were unnerving, dark, and succinct that could inform people about a common injustice that is barely acknowledged
Protect the innocent_1
Protect the innocent_2
In Protect the Innocent_1 I intentionally blurred the hand by manually adjusting the focus. I wanted to create a distance between the viewer the person the hand belongs to. This works to portray how muted the voices of the abused have become.
In Protect the Innocent_2 I wanted the subject to be bent over in a visibly distressed position. I asked for her to put her hands on her head as if she were pulling her hair out in anguish. I purposefully left her unrecognizable because I believed it best for this piece to not focus on a single recognizable person.
Stay Home.
Stay Social.
At the peak of COVID in the spring of 2020, I was looking for ways to process how I felt about what was going on. The resulting poster was this. Stay Home. Stay Social. I dunked text in water and collaged a photo of a phone from an old school magazine. The poster itself communicates the desire to keep people safe but the need to still connect with people. It’s easy to forget the ease with which we can connect with people in this day and age.
Lost
This poster was the result of experimentation. I was playing around with a print in the sink when the ink hadn’t dried so it began to smear. I began to smudge with my fingers and took photos of the print every time I did this. I then layered a couple of those photos together in photoshop and the resulting poster seemed to speak about identity. I toyed with some phrases and landed on “where did I go? I lost myself?” which was a question I had been asking myself not too long ago.
