Fighting Youth Voter Apathy

I thought that this was really funny and is a good way to encourage youth to vote.

20 Ridings...

This made me laugh. Voter turnout has been very low in previous years, what can people do to increase voter turnout and to combat voter apathy?

Political Art

This made me laugh, I liked the logos of different corporations that were placed throughout the picture. I thought that it related to class because there are such strong ties between corporations and the government and Campbell talks about it in The China Study. He speaks about how actual knowledge about things like diet will never really be well known because there are too many ties between the medical association and drug corporations.

Political Art

This is a picture of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Haiti is the brown barren side, while the Dominican Republic is the forest-filled side. I think that this is an interesting picture because I recently learned of tree-thieving of the Haitians of the Dominican trees is very common and is a huge issue. I think this illustrates the issue of what are countries going to do internationally once resource deletion is finally done?

Glue Pour

Last year in my high school art class, we did some stuff on Robert Smithson. Smithson is the credited with being the founder of the Earth art movement. What is Earth art? Earth art is the creation of art using mostly natural and holistic materials. Earth art is usually located in nature and pictures of the creations is what is displayed in a gallery, not the pieces themselves.

This is one of Smithson's pieces, entitled "Glue Pour". It is located somewhere around Vancouver, B.C. I think that although it's not intended to be political art, I think it has that behind it. I think that Earth art images are very moving and they show us how far removed we've become from nature, something that I consider to be one of our issues with dealing with many environmental issues today.

Carrot Mob!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUz0kM1u_jk


I really encourage everyone to watch at least one carrot mob video. It's such a neat concept. The idea is that by making educated or decisive consumer actions, mobs of people can influence stores to change things about how they do things.

Can You Guess What This Is?

Can you guess what this is?


A closer view:



This is a piece of art done by Chris Jordan. It depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the U.S. every SIX hours. I think that this qualifies as a piece of political art because it puts into one perspective the amount of waste that we generate as a Western society. Anyone should be able to look at this and be wowed, a million of anything is quite a bit, and plastic is a fairly non-renewable resource, especially because it's made from petroleum. We reached peak oil production in the 1970's and it's time to start thinking about things that are more renewable and aren't so wasteful.

"Your Chums Are Fighting, Why Aren't You?"

This is a Canadian propaganda poster from the first World War. I thought it was really interesting because the artwork was rather neat and the message was so direct.


The red and black and blue colours that were used on the poster were rather interesting. I felt that in the colours were in sync with the perceptions people have about war. The black silhouetted soldiers create a sense of anonymity as to who is serving. This could almost allow the person viewing the poster to imagine someone in the silhouette's places. The black ground does this same thing as well. The red colour I thought could serve to add a severeness to it, almost the thoughts of blood, but victory as well. The blue wind added interest and drew in the eye.


The message was really short, crisp and frank. I think it's simplicity would have made it stick to someone's mind, making it a handy tool to guilt people into being soldiers. If I would place a guess as to when about this poster was released I'd said pretty close to before or circonscription was in place.

Guernica

This is a picture of Picasso's Guernica, his depiction of the Spanish bombing that happened in 1937. I feel that even though it is a fairly old piece of political art, it is an important one nonetheless. This painting is known worldwide as being a centrepiece for the anti-war movement and helped spread knowledge around the world about the Spanish Civil War. 


I find the mural to be really interesting. It's really open to a lot of interpretation and it is easily seen that Picasso put a lot of thought into the postures and positions of the people portrayed. The twisted bodies of the people and animals show the pain and suffering that they went through after getting bombed. The horse is clearly screaming in pain. On the left hand side we see a mother weeping over a dead child. 


I don't think that this is what was in mind when he was commissioned to do work for the World's Fair in Paris, but it has had significant effects since then.