Friday, March 14, 2008

Roadkill

My original idea for my final multiples project was to screenprint chalk outlines of animals to put in the street to call some attention to roadkill. I thought it would be an interesting comment on the difference in activation of space between roadkill and a chalk outline of a human in the street, or the difference in value placed on human deaths vs. animal deaths. Then Christa pointed out that this project didn't really require a repeated multiple, nor did it require silkscreening at all--why wouldn't I just draw the outlines in the street? She was right. Anyway, after some googling, I found that it had been done before. This one's kind of funny:

I decided to stick with street or ground space for the final even though I gave up on the roadkill idea. I made prints of the bottoms of my feet and tracked my existence around Evanston. I only attached the newsprint to the ground using water, and when I went back the next day, the prints were mostly gone, which I had expected--the effect mimics my own disappearance from Evanston. 

An interesting unexpected effect was that the ink from the prints got on the bottoms of people's shoes and, when I went back to check on my sites, I found that some of them were gone but had new ones in place. They looked like this:




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