Stencil Art Rationale

Well, I’m not really the typical U of I college student in my political tendencies, since I lean generally Libertarian. I really dislike the amount of control the government has on our lives, and the way that we support a lot of really invasive governmental policies (and yes, I do realize this is ubiquitous in both major parties). So one of the problems that I have, in particular, is this idea that we as a country are all united, together and hoping for change, or whatever. I’m not a big Obama fan, for a myriad of reasons, and the hype that went through with his election this past year has really worried me in a lot of ways, because I feel like people made their choices based on what was cool, acceptable, or seemed like it was the right thing, without really knowing why. Most of the people that I talked to in the Fall that supported Obama couldn’t tell me why, except that “Bush was bad.” So I felt like, as a country—and especially as the youth that is increasingly dominating the world in pretty much every way—we were sort of chained into our ideals. The problem, to me, was that we were all united for Hope and Change, but we were sort of chained together in a negative way because we all wanted to fight against the bad policies of the last president, without considering what was going on then.

As such, I decided that I wanted to ridicule this idea of unity. I knew that I was going to include the word “united” with a question mark, because that was exactly how most of our campus felt after the election, but I don’t really feel like we should have. So I just wanted to criticize that whole empty rhetorical message. The image, though, was a little tougher to figure out. Originally, I kinda wanted to go with a riff on the Obama Hope posters, but it seemed too pointed, and I don’t really have anything against him, per se. So I decided to take the raised fist image, which is used so often to mean personal partisan revolt that it’s become a parody of itself; just think about all the bands, from Rage Against the Machine to Disturbed, who have used it to show their rebellious tendencies and so forth as a sort of (pseudo-) political message. So I took that image, thought about how I was upset with the unity we were displaying as a country (relying on image and what was “acceptable” in political terms), and put my imagery of the chains onto it. I thought it just made sense, because of the idea that we were supposedly fighting against everything bad—the political uprising part of the fist—but we were only doing it because we were told to—thus the chains. The fist is such an obvious metaphor that I thought putting them in chains would get right to the heart of what I was interested in.