Creative Project Narrative
For the style of the painting, I chose to keep the color palette very simple, using only two colors, with different shades for one of them. I made this decision because many people frame “justice” as a simple, absolute concept. I feel like justice is far more complex than that, and I often feel as though situations that others perceive as “just” are not what they seem. This relates to the way our society is currently framing the issue of police brutality and vigilante “justice” against victims who are disproportionately African American males.
I chose to create the painting on four different canvases with gaps between each. The image is designed so that the canvases are spaced to leave out parts of the images. This is to represent the gaps that I perceive in our justice system, from the level of law enforcement, to the issues with our court and jury system, to the way our laws and institutions are designed to disproportionately harm African Americans.
For the text, I decided to incorporate various details related to the Black Lives Matter movement. I decided to incorporate various phrases that are associated with incidents of injustice against African American men, such as “I can’t breathe,” and “Hands up, don’t shoot!” I also included statistics, cities with high levels of police brutality, and the names of victims.
I placed the text in the gaps between the canvases to demonstrate where I think the justice system has failed African Americans. To reinforce the meaning of the text, I placed “I can’t breathe” on the chest of Lady Justice, “Hands up, don’t shoot” by her arm, and the badge by her chest. The badge combines text and image to explain the disparities in the way police treat citizens of different races. In terms of the visual size of the text, I made the statistics smaller and the names larger to demonstrate the fact that statistics are important to show trends and to prove the existence of the overall problem to “skeptics,” but the individual victims matter most of all. The text is falling at different angles on the edge of the painting to represent the way that African Americans are falling through the cracks of the justice system.
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