MEET YOUR MEAT (2009)
Low-VOC, remnant latex paint, custom-cut stencils, vinyl type. Completed at the old Federal Building, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
MYM was a temporary, site-specific mural, devised to fit the unusual architecture of the space. Its over-sized red type and large silhouetted shapes were informed by the graphic design vernacular of butcher shop windows and supermarket deli displays, while the color palette was intended to to suggest fur, feathers, flesh and blood.
Artist's Statement:
Everyone eats, thus food production shapes our world and our use of its natural resources. Rather than focusing on the ethics and emotional content of exploiting other animals in the interest of human food production, my mural confronts the environmental consequences of such systems.
The statistics cited in MEET YOUR MEAT are not subject to individual perspective or belief systems; The destruction they represent is visibly manifest all around us - the true cost of industrial-scaled, animal-based agriculture. Regardless of whether or not one presumes “dominion” over other living creatures, one should accept that raising livestock to feed billions of people is an ecologically devastating, grossly inefficient material proposition.