Angela Iacono
Professor Noriega
Digital Media Foundations
April 14th, 2020
Guns in America
The Brooklyn Art Museum holds over 1.5 million pieces of art ranging from Asian paintings and sculptures to even contemporary art. It is located in Brooklyn, New York and is the third largest museum in all of New York. JR Chronicles art was featured in the Brooklyn Art Museum and showcased his essence and power of storytelling through unique techniques and scale. His piece Guns in America, featured in Time Magazine, allows you to hear everyone’s story about how guns are apart of their lives and how it has positively and negatively affected them.
JR is a French artist and photographer, “known for his murals around the world that portray complex social issues”. His piece Guns in America allowed people from Washington D.C, Saint Louis, and Dallas. There were 245 people that arrived and agreed to share their story and possibly understand the opposing sides perspective.
Guns in America captures different points of views so clearly that there are never any questions asked other than, what are they saying? I think for this piece it was not only effective visually but hearing each particular story as to why they believed guns were good or bad was extremely eye-opening. Not only was it visually compelling but I believe the scale of the piece really helped your eye move around the piece a lot. I think the scale is a very important factor because it shows how prominent the issues are regarding guns in America. It helps you realize that it has affected many different people and many different people have different experiences.
The composition, how things are placed, of Guns in America shows pro-gun and anti-gun on opposite sides of the spectrum. The anti-gun people are on the left, while the pro-gun people are on the right. This composition could represent the views of the majority of the people, whether there are left-wing or right-wing. In the bottom-middle of the artwork it shows a press conference table and it’s there so people can start a conversation or even spark debate. The significance of the conference table being in the middle allows both sides to not outweigh the other but allows them to freely speak. Cropping was also present in the piece. Towards the top you will see blurred out signs and extra people that are out of line of sight, cropping in this piece allows it the art to look fuller and gets rid of unwanted empty space. The cropping helps the art make you more focused and centered in on the people.
