Critique

My piece is characterized by the juxtaposition of flowers, which embody nature and its inherent freedom, and three scrutinizing cameras. Innocence clashes with the ominous control of surveillance, a contrast emphasized by the striking black and white. The first security camera is quite evident in the piece; it blossoms out of the stem of a flower in the foreground. The other two, however, seem to hide among the flowers. The surreal additions morph the meaning of the image from one that celebrates the beauty of a field of flowers to one that comments on mass surveillance’s ability to mar. With the advent of social media, among other technologies, this type of surveillance has become almost natural. We accept it without question, electing to give up our freedom to have accesses to certain services and a higher sense of protection. Mass surveillance is our landscape.

Reflection

I like my final product, but I feel that if it were to be used as a stencil for street art the bottom left corner of the image would be too hectic and the upper right would be too lacking. Furthermore, I am not certain that my image conveys the themes I wanted it to; perhaps, I should have included an element that would more closely relate it to humans, like the small girl in Banksy’s work. I also thought about adding blinking red lights to the cameras, but decided against it since that would not make the piece transferable to a stencil.

Overall, I enjoyed this assignment because it gave me the opportunity to explore a non-traditional aspect of art that I had typically written off as graffiti.