Witch Hunt is a print-based poster series designed for my Visual Poetics and Narrative course I took in the Fall of 2016. The assignment was to design a PSA and display it visually either in print or sculpture.
This project was designed to highlight the cyclic nature of media scares. The print-based project looked at historical trends of demonizing popular media that was viewed as harmful to society, despite a lack of evidence supporting these claims. Every generation has a media form pinpointed as the “corrupter of the youth” in a gross media witch hunt aimed at censoring art.
We see these trends from the creation of the horror movie in Psycho, through Elvis and the birth of rock and roll, in the various genres of metal that evolved out of the 1980’s, and through today with video gaming.
Each illustration was composed and drawn in Adobe Illustrator CC 2017. I built two different textures to both help give each piece character and to embody the grungier vibes of the piece. The intent of the positive and negative patterns/brushes is to give the illustration an ink stamped quality.
The typographic elements in red use the characters from the words Witch Hunt to create shape and were heavily inspired by the visual poetics work of Derek Beaulieu. The same textures were applied to these characters.
Each piece was printed at 11" by 17" for demonstrative purposes and scaled up to 33" by 51" for display in the Vertical Gallery at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
"The genre of Horror and the trend of violence in movies has been a growing cause for concern in parents since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. There has never been a positive correlation between these films and youth behavior. A call for media censorship robs artists of self-expression. In reality, the rate of violent crime in young people has fallen steadily regardless of what is playing in the cinema. It has always been a Witch Hunt."
"Elvis' hip-shaking dance moves stirred a national outroar in the 1950's. These provocative gyrations caused mass worry in parents across the country, worry that this expression on music would alter youth behavior in a negative way. In reality, the rate of violent crime in young people has fallen steadily regardless of what is playing on the radio. It has always been a Witch Hunt."
"With the inception Heavy Metal music in the 1980's came a national outroar of parents claiming that the genre's fast tempo, 'dangerous' subject matter, and 'violent' culture surrounding the genre was detrimental to youths across the country. In reality, the rate of violent crime in young people has fallen steadily regardless of what is playing on the radio. It has always been a Witch Hunt."
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