For my Visual Communication Design 1 class, we were instructed to create a poster for social awareness regarding gun violence on African-Americans, which has been a national discussion in light of the recent Ferguson case.
The idea behind my poster was inspired by Andy Warhol, who created a series of works focusing on tragedies in the early 1960's. His approach to these works was to take an image from a newspaper and make multiple silkscreens repeating that image throughout with a garish color palette. As exemplified by his quote on my poster, Warhol did this because he wanted the repetition to analyze how we Americans view and understand certain events and problems.
I was not looking to take a stance on either side of the case for my poster, but rather to do an analysis on the built-up tension between these two groups, particularly in Ferguson. I took an image that went viral, which showed a tense encounter between the rioters and the police, and I replicated a silkscreen-like effect while also repeating the image.
The ultimate message I was trying to get across was that regardless of which side you take on who was at fault for the case, the larger picture is that there has been a history of tension between these two groups; I want to bring awareness to that so it is not a taboo subject and we as Americans can find a way to collectively find a positive solution.
