Upon hearing the description of the project, I immediately had one idea and stuck with it throughout the entire process. That idea was to portray Los Angeles as a lot of native people know it. Los Angeles is a great city and I will always love it, but besides all the glamour that the media shows, LA is riddled with poverty, homelessness, gang crime, liter and pollution. I wanted to display this in an art installation.
I created a series of graffiti posters on white to substitute not being able to paint on the walls. These posters represent gangs and anti police phrases.
Then I used a stained sheet and pillow also in white to mimic a homeless person sleeping on the streets with this graffiti above him/her. The Homeless person is accompanied by a large amount of liter, either from him/her or other people, you can never tell.
I used white walls to block off the class from the installation until they actually visit it to show that people don’t actually know how LA is until they experience it for themselves. All a person knows before they educate themselves is what they are told and what they see on TV/social media. The homeless person is also in white because there isn’t anything known about the person. They are often overlooked in society and become an outcast, a shape or outline rather than a human being.
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