Infanticide

This one I call "Infanticide" for reasons that I hope are quite clear. I pretty much thought of the slogan first and then made a collage to go along with the message. The words are, once again, done in whiteout. The background and children were taken from a book on Latin American indigenous culture. The bodies on the ground I found in a first aid book and the rest are from various magazines and childrens books. The military guy on the left was a challenge. I wasn't able to find a large enough picture of a soldier or even a camo outfit, so I cut out an image of a guy that was about the size I want and I found various pictures of people wearing camo and cut them up, mixed them up and glued them over his clothes to create a uniform. By the way, I don't know if you can tell, but the girl in the front is wearing a suicide bomber vest. Sweet! As for the canvas, when I started making this one, I was unable to find a sheet of paper big enough for this one, so I dug through my friend's recycling (I almost never collage in my own home.) and found a Cheerios box, which I cut up and used. Since then I have only used the cardboard containers of various food stuffs and other thick, flat, paper based surfaces for my collages.
Like the two critiques on religion, this one has a fairly clear message behind it. Most of my other collages do not have much of an actual message behind them. I often start making a collage with a particular message in mind, but as I progress the message gets more and more abstract and convoluted. However, I do often intentionally use loaded imagery, so whether or not there is an intended message behind the collage, people will try to find one. Whatever you think the collage means is what it means. Now that I have bestowed this secret upon you, don't let it prevent you from trying to interpret any of my collages.

Black Construction Paper Critiques on Religion

These are two collages that I made a while ago. The top one is called "Blackconstructionpapercritiqueonreligion" and the second one is titled "Blackconstructionpapercritiqueonreligiononion". These are both made on black construction paper and, unlike most of my collages, use images printed off of the internet (this is a technique I tend to look down on, since part of the challenge of making collages is digging through books and magazines to find the images you need). All of the writing on them is done in whiteout.
Before I started taking collaging a little more seriously I would never use glue and would strictly use scotch tape to hold everything down. I enjoyed the fact that when I made copies the flyers I made, people could still see the outlines of the tape. In the case of this first collage (I don't feel like retyping the title) I chose to go overboard with the tape even going so far to layer tape over all of the words. I found that the tape gives the image a rad glow effect and makes the words appear to radiate out of it. The hand is a printed off copy of the Our Father and Hail Mary cut out in the shape of a hand. The rosary is made of green thread that I stole from my roommate adn images of pennies, quarters, nickels and dimes.
By the time I got around to the second one, which I made after finally learning of the miracles one can accomplish with rubber cement, is not entirely reliant on scotch tape. However, I still use it some tape, which I covered the dollar with to once again give it a janky glow effect.
I got the ideas for these two collages when I was reading an article by Naomi Klein Harper's entitled "Disaster Capitalism". In the article, Naomi Klein discussed the outsourcing of government functions to independen, profit interested companies (the most clear example of this would be the use of Blackwater mercenaries in place of the police in New Orleans) and how these companies are taking advantage of disasters, natural and man made, as business opportunities. I'm not going to go into much more detail on the article, however she has put out a book on it called "The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism". After reading that article I thought about how much of the religious right seems to believe that all these disasters in the world are "God's will" or even the rapture and that all they need to do to gain salvation and avoid these disasters themselves is get rich at other people's expense and have a quick getaway and that is where I got the idea to make these collages.
One of the key concepts of Christianity is that Christ "died to save us from our sins" or "debts" (I have heard it said both ways). In the second collage I use that concept, except play with the word "debt" by applying it the modern idea of monetary debt and show the dollar as being representative of Christ, who one hand is "sacrificing" to the other.