by Elise Juncker
Artist Statement
Parts of this piece are strangely menacing to me. The man in the bunny costume invokes an almost forgotten childhood horror. But what we once found strange or menacing, may now just be a part of life. This collage is scrapped together from both the actual content, but also the advertisements found in old issues of the National Geographic Magazine. The source mirrors the tension I feel between learning and earning. I believe that a lot of students feel the strain of academia being more and more commercialized, the pressure of making yourself “marketable”, and the notion of the American Dream (= a sense of optimism for the future) slipping away further. This collage is meant to take old and new images, the familiar and the strange, and to blend it in a way that makes everything seem just a little off.