Blog post by Kayla Coons
Recently, I visited the Art Center of the Capital Region, located in Troy. The East Coast National Screen Print Biennale was the show being exhibited. While looking at the show, there was one artist’s work that drew me in the most. The art work of Professor Tim High caught my eye immediately. He displayed a 22 by 30 inch photoserigraph titled Feeding Frenzy III- Fair Competition. The piece depicts babies in water swimming with sharks. The babies are floating around with very aloof looking expressions on their tiny faces. The infants are completely blind of the grave danger they are in for. The sharks are circling them with wide, hungry, sneering mouths. Behind the image of the babies and the sharks are the name brands of popular companies, such as Walt Disney, At&t, Starbucks, McDonalds, Google, and Bentley. There is also the image of the swastika symbol in the right bottom corner. These companies represent all of the ideas, images and expectations that we are surrounding and submersing our future generations. Corporations and businesses that are run on wealth, greed and power. It is like throwing our children to sharks, to a money hungry world focused on themselves. People do not worry about others well being, we are not taught to better the community but ourselves. We are pressured into believing that fame and fortune are our right destinies. This piece is very powerful and blunt, even though the colors are cool and muted. You are tricked into feeling comfortable until you realize what you are supposed to be thinking. You feel worry and questioning when you see the calm babies about to be gruesomely taken advantage of. Our society needs to be more aware of the conditions and expectations we are creating for our children. We expect them to go to school for mass amounts of time for jobs they will not love. We train them to need money and to feel a greedy need to be better than everyone around them. To only think about themselves and not to worry about who is being thrown to the sharks. We force ideas of unrealistic ideal lives into their heads, lives with big houses, fast cars and unhealthy minds and bodies.
