Argueza, Leigh Anne (Wk. 7- Claudia Zapata)

    After reading this week’s essay titled “Chicanx Graphics in the Digital Age” by Claudia Zapata, I found myself thinking about how impactful digital mediums could be in terms of artistic activism. It also reminded me how accessibility to information by using these types of mediums is necessary for community inclusivity, but also the ease of replication or distribution of these artistic images are formed. I was mostly drawn to the artist Oree Originol’s social justice project titled Justice for Our Lives where he responded to the atrocities of state-sanctioned violence against the Black community and stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. His ongoing project consists of a series of black-and-white digital singular portraits with each of the victim’s likeness, where he worked personally with the victim’s families to ensure each portrait’s authenticity was conveyed. Each of these simplistic portraits is available for download on Originol’s website where it’s accessible to be printed out and circulated within the communities.

    I think that Originol’s ingenuity for his pieces in Justice for Our Lives originates form identifying first and foremost that not all households have accessibility to the latest and greatest computers or software to print a colorful, intricate portraits of each victim. Instead, he uses his portrait’s simplistic austerity with black-and-white as a method to strip each portrait down to the most basic version that can be rendered without convoluting or rather, misrepresenting them. In addition, his portraits are easier to duplicate in mass numbers without hindering the communities that use them to aid their causes. I found that Originol’s portraits were most impactful because they not only were created in response to a continuous racial, cultural, and political resistance that has been a long and arduous conflict, but also because it mobilizes efficiently without disrespecting the faces that are being duplicated by Originol’s insistence to include each victim’s family in the process of creation.