Pig Blindness
What happens when animal ethics and popular culture collide? We live in a society that is obsessed with looking at celebrities and fashion, and fashion magazines provide the perfect venue. At the same time, we disavow the serious abuse of farmed animals caught up in the web of our food industries. As an artist whose work explores the human animal relationship, this series points out our obsessive fashion voyeurism and our subsequent blindness towards our farmed food animals.
A slaughterhouse employee remarked that his job wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t have to look at the animals because they have such human eyes. By giving the pigs human eyes and elevating them to celebrity model, this work reverses the gaze from the animal to the human, thus redirecting and opening our eyes, hearts and minds to discussion and change. Overall, animals are my muse, but it was fashion that inspired this work.