Humanity II was created after George Floyd's murder, addressing white privilege in the context of social change. It utilizes the colonizing imagery of vintage children's books as source material, which takes on new meaning through a contemporary context. The abstracted backdrop is that of the Walter Scott murder in North Charleston, South Carolina, and plays with the idea of the "human race," placing the stretched colonizing imagery into a broken image space created through Photoshop. However, as the second painting of a short series, I felt the need to cover most of the image in black, placing focus upon the two figures, one broken through abstraction and the other juxtaposed and abstracted through an elongated stretch, both running to the left. Also, the black form behind the plexiglass creates a highly reflective surface that includes the viewer within the composition.
