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Conopoly: A Junior Conceptual Project by Willem Geier (2015)

I am exploring the feeling of insecurity through the experience of playing games. For my digital medium, I used Adobe Illustrator to create a game board resembling the popular family game, Monopoly. As for my fine art medium, I melted plastic green army men onto the game board. I used a heat gun to melt the plastic onto some aluminum foil and then peeled them off, and glued them onto the board using a hot glue gun.

The art itself relates to the second half of the concept, playing games, obviously because it mimics Monopoly. However, each property is either a United States conflict, or facility related to war, showing insecurity because there virtually is no security in other countries that we invade. The deeper and rather scarier message I conveyed in here is that war itself is played as if it were a game. Putting prices on these wars that have cost many human lives is quite grotesque in and of itself. There is still a greater cost than money, people. This is euphemised, and in doing so, those people who run these wars treat these soldiers as if all they were were just green army men on a game board. The melted soldiers on the board also tie into the destruction of war, as it parallels Vietnam, people were napalmed by a greater more powerful force, just as these plastic men were melted by a larger being than them. The soldiers who fight these wars are discredited when toys are made in their place.
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