Print Series- Artist's Statement

World War II has always been an interest of mine. It was a very gruesome and large event that impacted many countries around the world. Using the confinements of the initial words, I fabricated a fairytale of the war to sugarcoat parts that are still hard to consider in present day. My initial approach was to desensitize history through the use of cats, censoring scenes of WWII to make them appear more whimsical, as if a story of war as being explained to a child. To further emphasize the child-like nature of the pieces, I applied my own drawings into the piece crudely held in place my masking tape. It is not a way of laughing at the events of WWII, but looking through a surreal perspective of censorship to separate the viewer from the images.

All the words fit fluidly in my first piece as I began exploring my collage approach to the series in Concept 1. Trying to keep the outer space setting a secondary part to the image, I crowded the moon with burning buildings pulled from WWII scenes. I used an iconic Hitler to specify this particular war. The hand-drawn rafflesia and cats were drawn and scanned on tracing paper to replace a tank and grenades. I placed the fictional LOST character subtly into the soldier’s helmet. His expression accompanied by the cats along with the rafflesia tank creates the whimsical atmosphere I was aiming for.

When I began my second piece, I decided to continue with working on scenes from WWII. I decided I wanted my images to be more cohesive with each other with less random images pasted on top of each other. I stuck with one picture of the London Blitz and inserted three Nazi planes, repeating and resizing them in a pattern that moved across the sky. Instead of bombs, falling cats dropped from the sky. I used the same tracing paper drawing technique and also added some drawn cupcakes to the bottom so the cats did not appear to be falling to a fiery death, but a delicious break to their fall.

The final piece was tough. I really wanted to depict Auschwitz, but the concentration camp seemed to be a very conversial subject to desensitize. I decided not the place in the mass graves but stick to the more subtle approach I’ve been using. The smoke in the background suggests the crematories in progress, but it is not the focus. I found a walkway scene from Auschwitz and decided to cover it with many cats roaming about the aisle. I inserted the iconic Auschwitz gate over the walkway to tell the viewer where we are, but hung a drawn ‘Cats 4 Sale’ sign underneath to shift the idea of a terrible camp into a curious place filled with cats.