Place and Displacement

For my final project regarding the unit of Place and Displacement, I’ll still be working around my video game idea, but taking what you commented on my proposal and making sure my project is still representing the aspect of cultural conflict, just in a fictional world. When I hear cultural conflict where one group is displacing the other, I immediately think of a person, possibly the main character, who is placed in a whole new environment or setting where the area is so different that it’s actually oppressing the main character. As a more realistic example, I picture Native Americans today being forced out of their homelands by white people and being forced to live in small reserves or camps. The oppression towards the Native Americans by the white people is purely complex cultural conflict where the whites are displacing the Native Americans and taking control.

In my project, since I’m revolving my image around video games, I created a scene where the “Place and Displacement” is seen as the main character being forced out of a city based upon their looks and cultural history. The game I’m referencing is The Witcher 3. Playing as the Witcher, I quickly learned that I was not exactly welcome to any city because of my history and power as a Witcher. My inspiration in my final piece is Banksy. All of their work is simple and to the point where the combination of different cultures in such a small space can be easily portrayed. An example is Banksy’s Birds of a Feather, where one bird is being excluded and pushed away simply because it’s a different species from the other birds. Using this piece as my inspiration, I added a little twist to my piece to accentuate the realistic issue of the United States of America immigrant policy and how many people are pushed away simply because of their race, even when they’re just looking for asylum.

(Banksy)

As for the element of art is my final piece, I have taken a more abstract path for my image and used shapes to create the people, background, buildings, and structures. Since I believe I’m still not the best at illustrator, I used the element of shapes to portray everything I need in my work. The shapes I used all came from the Rectangle Tool, Ellipse Tool, Polygon Tool, Star Tool, Line Segment Tool in which I manipulated the position, angle, size, and color of each shape to portray my vision into my artwork. I used circles when I needed to make smoother, rounder shapes, like the faces, and I used quadrilaterals when I was creating the buildings, symbols, and roofs.

In short, I’m using one of my favorite video games, The Witcher 3, as the design style of my image and having the characters represents a common issue, we as United States citizens see every day, where people are denied entrance into the United States daily because they don’t have the right papers, and our border laws have some issues here and there. Even if the people are seeking asylum, they’re technically not allowed in, but we declared ourselves as a country open to people around the world who need help, but now it doesn’t even feel like that anymore. Overall, I’m happy with how my image turned out and I’m proud of how much my skills have improved in the last week.

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Bibliography

Banksy. Birds of a Feather. 2014. https://goodgarbs.com/2014/10/07/art-banksy-unveils-birds-of-a-feather-and-art-buff/