'Colour Isn't A Crime'

Grade 11 RAP Visual Art

11 x 14 inches, acrylic and pencil crayon

My artwork is an acrylic painting that captivates the issues with colourism and police brutality since that is the huge human rights awareness, in terms of racial discrimination. I created a man with different pigments as the focal point to represent different races and cultures. He appears to be convicted and is taking a mugshot photo. On his face are handcuffs, acting as a magnifying glass to zoom in the man's alluring eye. Inside the magnifying glass, is the man's eye with darker pigment and a gun target, to represent how the police can act as a judge, jury, and executioner based on the colour of the skin rather than the actual crime. The 'magnifying glass' expressed by handcuffs is a motif that represents the broken justice system, of how irrational and biased it is, enforced by people that don't comply with proper arrests and sentences against people of colour in comparison to white people. I basically divided the face using the handcuffs to show how the law exercises division in the criminal system, brutally torturing and harming the safety of the person simply because the colour of their skin doesn't 'seem worth their life to save'. I used white pencil crayon to make small repeated written captions in the background that helps explain my piece as a whole, 'skin colour is not a crime.'