OUTWARD AND AWARE

With the starting point of 'an outward and aware theme' and having been vegan for nearing on four years, and vegetarian for an additional three prior to that, I've been acutely aware of the propaganda and misinformation surrounding animal agriculture and veganism for a very long time - in particular the oxymoron that gets thrown about a lot in retaliation, 'humane slaughter'.

Vaguely stretched from my portraits triptych which explored how we accept constructed narratives of figures like famous and religious characters I came to the conclusion of basing the installation around the relationship between the victims of the Jewish Holocaust and the Animal Holocaust which is still occurring today and on a much larger scale. The main man Gary Yourovsky spoke at length about this topic before his ultimate retirement last year but essentially his point is that after the Jewish Holocaust, the same gas chambers continued to be used for the murder of pigs but we've been taught for no purpose other than money making that the brutal murder of some species is justified. It's argued that what is happening in farming is worse than what happened to Jewish people because of the longevity and widespread nature of the issue but again, someone has decided to make money out of innocent and sentient being's corpses, whilst inflicting beastiality, rape, infanticide, kidnap and slavery on them and with the mass use of propaganda the majority of us are ignorant to the situation or actively choose to turn a blind eye out of convenience.

My concept is fairly simple but with such a controversial topic it would seem pointless to come at it from any kind of elitist angle as that would only make it less accessible, deter more people from actually continuing to engage with the concept after viewing and uphold the idea that veganism is for privileged middle class white people (pretty ridiculous propaganda considering the cheapest diet happens to be vegan and immigrants and those populating third world countries are forced into exploitative farming jobs to feed the West).

So... the installation would take its form on the outside walls of a working slaughter house. Obviously, many are hidden away but there are some in action where you can hear the pig's screams  from the perimeters of the building and the roadside. I'd project jittery footage of what would be suggested as Jewish people inside the chambers in a way that would make the videos look like scenes from a horror movie. I would have only a few seconds of footage of each that would pause and get stuck to hold viewers in to frames where the faces are particularly expressive. 

The work of Kate Louise Powell has subconsciously influenced this with her strong clear messages. Her depiction of 250 eyes of different animals runs along the same theme of the unity shared between victims.