Photomontage: Image Hijack (Part 2)

There is currently a very serious problem where children of asylum seekers are being separated from their parents and are kept in detention centers across the country without documentation of which child belongs to which adult.  Children are kept in large cages, some without shelter, and they are terrified and traumatized and many of these families have no way of finding each other to reconnect once the nightmare ends.  Frida Kahlo suffered a tragic bus accident that crippled her and kept her in chronic pain for the rest of her life, and as a result, she was never able to have her own children.  This famous painting, self-portrait, shows Frida’s pain, sadness and extreme torture with confinement in her own damaged body and heartbreak of loss of time and the ability to have children.  I integrated images to represent the pain and loss of family of asylum seekers caused by our government and horrible border control policies.  The monkeys in a cage represent how Donald Trump sees “illegal immigrants” as animals and not people, and I also included his quote stating such.  This represents quite literally how the asylum seekers are kept in cages like animals.  The man at the bottom right of the photomontage is a picture of a real border patrol officer; his placement is meant to help the viewer understand the context of my message.  The toy soldiers represent the ludicrous nature of this family separation problem by showing toys as regulating the detention centers, it shows how our government doesn’t take this issue seriously and our border control policies are a joke.

I think this photomontage would be best placed in social media.  This is exactly the kind of art I see in my Facebook feed on a daily basis as my friends try to use their posts to create awareness of our current state of our declining republic.  People should know what their president is doing and saying and social media spreads information like wildfire.