Artist Statement

“General Motor’s Lil’ Playground”

“General Motor’s Lil’ Playground” is a series of propaganda posters promoting public transit as the better option over automobile transportation. As pedestrians, we should be able to get from one place to another with more walkable areas. Car companies lobby politicians and have had a hand in developing neighbourhoods built for cars rather than for people. Cars not only obstruct pedestrian routes with the expansion of more roads, but they have also been the cause of vehicular fatalities and climate change. Public transit is guaranteed to solve this problem. Not only are public transit systems cheaper to develop and maintain, but they also reduce heavy traffic as well as emit fewer carbon gasses. In the interest of making profits, car companies actively sabotaged the development of public transit by buying their businesses to remove their competition. Car companies used marketing campaigns to make it look as if cars are superior to public transit which objectively is false in every way. My propaganda series against car companies shows how their products hurt a humane way of life and show what progressive urban development has to offer.

My posters are parodies of car advertisements, using the logos of Nissan, BMW, Audi, and Ford, replacing their names with public transit vehicles as salt in the wound. I chose to use digital rendering tools such as Blender, Illustrator and Photoshop, to make the scenes look like simple toy figurines. These toy-like environments suggest that car companies are manipulating our neighbourhoods like their own little playgrounds. I have combined 3D rendered assets within the 2-dimensional picture plane to suggest that a world that is built for cars feels uncanny and uncomfortable. The colourful artificial aesthetic isn’t a world where people should exist. The images remind us that buses, trains, and bicycles exist and can provide a better place where you always get to work on time. A world that can’t be manipulated by greedy car companies.