From my perspective, Times Square can only be described as chaotic and stressful, the white-hot light of the advertisements cast down on the chaotic street, where wide-eyed tourists stand wander around aimlessly with their giant plastic bags from the M&M store. Street performers scatter throughout the square in trying to earn a five dollar bill from the pocket of an excited tourist. Of course there are policemen harassing the occasional harmless homeless person in the square. Times Square has an aggressive type of negative energy and while it is generally viewed as an important landmark in Manhattan I have personally never seen it as an example of how far we have come as a species, but more as a sad place where people come to look at a huge waste of resources where they can buy a plastic souvenir quite probably assembled by a sad child in Asia; sort of like a collaboration of everything saddening about the human run world we live in– greed, waste, indifference to others. To put it simply, the Square is an anxiety inducing setting for me; if a person were to embody Time Square they would most likely be scared and almost acting like a wild animal trapped in a cage, they would need to get out. For this montage project, I’m hoping to use digital illustrations to show how the park affects my temperament, using clutter and bright colors to demonstrate how bright, colorful and overwhelming Times Square is.
