SHeep
The fear of being ‘politically incorrect in the media and getting criticized for whatever I said caused me to blindly follow along with the mass opinion like sheep. However, I realized that parroting a single narrative only creates an environment where progressive discussions are prevented.
Hence in Sheep, I blank out the mouths of the sheep with black paint to criticize this situation. I also use markers to satirically reflect and express my thoughts in the phrases within the piece.
Intent
We live in a society where citizens are no longer mere information consumers but also active content producers. For this piece, I wanted to call attention to how mob mentality pervades our media environment and how the pressure of maintaining political correctness has nullified our ability for us to think critically. Initially, I thought of explicitly representing this with a person with hands covering their mouth. But because I wanted to allude to how mainstream media outlets and journalists tend to side with whatever the mass opinion is, I wanted to symbolize this by drawing a crowd of sheep. To paint this, I used warm-toned and saturated colors to represent the emotional nature of our discourse and how divisiveness spreads like wildfire.
Planning/Sketching ideas
Originally, I had planned to paint duct tape on the sheep's mouth to symbolize the silencing. However when I did so (as seen in the bottom, second picture from the left, the tape seemed to be lost amongst the many sheeps I painted. Thus, I used a more graffiti like style, emblematic of protesting. By using black paint, I highlighted the cancellations in digital media.
Process