Protest Poster

Artist's Statement
          This project stemmed from a Japanese class I was in last week. The class focuses on speaking and thus each class begins with an opportunity to have conversation with the fellow students in Japanese. We are assigned topics beforehand so that we can prepare what we will say in class. That particular day's topic was to be a a debate, "Does the United States of America's future look bright?" I figured this would be a fairly lop-sided debate seeing as all the class members, with the exception of one Canadian, were all young, male, born and raised American citizens. To my surprise, when the class divided into teams myself and the Canadian were the only two with a vote of confidence for America, the rest spent the the entire time trying to convince us that our country was doomed. I having been raised in, what I consider, a very patriotic home thought that everyone was as invested in the future of our country as my family is. One of my arguments was that the current generation had recently become more proactive in politics and I asked home many had voted in the previous election. Only myself and one other class member out of the 15 or so had. Perhaps, as the assigned viewing suggested, I had heard only a single story all my life and faith really is dwindling.
          My simple and subtle poster is trying to call attention to the lack of faith in my generation. It may not be noticeable at first, but the engraving on the US 25 cent piece has been altered slightly. Instead of reading "In God We Trust" the letters "ed" have been added onto the end to make it past tense. Our nation was founded on certain beliefs that are slowly being abandoned. This gradual change to complacency has made us loose focus of our duty as citizens. To emphasize this gradual change in attitude I purposely did not draw attention to the change of wording but left it up to the viewer to figure it out, which is exactly the predicament we find ourselves now. An influential movie in the creation of this poster was the newer version of Miracle on 34th Street in which money, in that case a dollar bill, was used to remind the court system the beliefs on which they were founded. Although my focus is somewhat different from the movie the idea of calling the people to a remembrance of our founding fathers is still very apparent.