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Dollar Sign Icon | Financial Security
Red Cross Icon | Health / Healthcare
House Icon | Stable Home Enviroment
Smiley Face | Happyness
tools used
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The Minus Project was created in response to a calling all artists campaign. The parameters where simple: Show how poverty affects the inflicted in a way that is not normally seen. As a graphic designer my tendency is to reduce the intended message in a manner that, through simplicity, highlights only the core. So when designing my entry I chose four universally recognizable symbols. They where the Dollar Sign, Red Cross, House Icon, & the Smiley Face. I then graphically subtracted as much as I could from the initial shapes as to leave them in a state in which they where still recognizable but where in no way full. My intent was to strip as much away from these basic pillars of life we so readily enjoy and take for granted so, much like the individual who find themselves in poverty, the viewer has a sense of what it is but does not possess it in its entirety.
My first plan was to submit a set of generic poster-board tabloid-sized prints, but I felt that medium didn't give the concept justice. After experimenting with several different alloys, I eventually decided on lead. I melted lead diver-weights at around 650 °F and cast large bullion shaped bricks. I then used a mason chisel and hand held sledge hammer to carve each section of my initial designs. This process consumed a period of three weeks and after the lead fragments where fully sculpted I drilled holes into their rear faces and inserted ScrewAll rods into the holes. Each fragment, with rod attached, was then placed into corresponding holes in a composite board slab. Four more holes where drilled at the board's four corners and a plexiglass sheet was affixed with ScrewAll rods.
Conceptually speaking, the plexiglass stands as a symbol for the divide that exists between us as artists / intellectuals who merely study and contemplate the meanings and ramifications of our subject matter – poverty, and the poor themselves. We do nothing to help or in any way alleviate the impoverished, we only speculate, far absolved from the reality that exists in every city and suburb around the world.
thank you
