Photomontage Image Hijack Final Project, "Inferno"

 

Charles O'Rear's "Bliss"

Meghan D. Coates's "Inferno"

    The political issue I chose was global warming/climate change, an issue near and dear to my heart since my early childhood, the first issue I ever protested or made protest art for. I was right about so many things, and as I watch the world burn down around me (it feels literal--the pandemic has me stuck in California, where I’ve been watching the sky catch fire and the smoke choke out the sun for the last month or two) I can’t stop thinking about the way the climate has changed since I was small--October didn’t used to be the hottest month of the year, New York Christmases were once white instead of brown, and the Arctic Circle was all ice and no flame.

    This piece uses the Windows XP default home screen, “Bliss,” as the backbone, paired with pieces taken from Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer, the Microsoft XP Logo-flag, and images accompanying Richard E. Peltier’s “Hazards of Breathing Wildfire Smoke...,” and Rebecca Perring’s “Massive Fire Breaks Out...,” arranged and manipulated to more properly resemble the world as (it feels) we’ve made it in the time since the original photograph was taken (January 1996), around a year and ten months before I was born. Using the Death Dealer as something akin to one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse pausing near the crest of the hill, it's meant to be a bleak and heavy-handed reminder that the world no longer really has a chance to go back to the way things were; our only opportunity is to fight to keep them from getting worse than they’ve already been made, and we’re running out of time.

    I think ideally I would display this as a billboard, to make it something larger than life that people weren’t able to avoid.   

Bibliography:

“Bliss (Image).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Aug. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(image). 

Comics, Cap'n's. Death Dealer by Frank Frazetta, CAP'N'S COMICS , 1 Jan. 1970, capnscomics.blogspot.com/2014/04/death-dealer-by-frank-frazetta.html. 

“Microsoft Windows.” Logopedia, logos.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Windows. 

Peltier, Richard E. “The Hazards of Breathing Wildfire Smoke.” Pacific Standard, Grist, 8 Dec. 2017, psmag.com/environment/health-hazards-of-breathing-wildfire. 

Perring, Rebecca. “Massive Fire Breaks out at Factory Sending Plumes of Black Smoke 200ft into the Air.” Express.co.uk, Express.co.uk, 29 Dec. 2015, www.express.co.uk/news/uk/630112/Leicester-fire-factory-river-smoke.