"It’s a shame that I needed a prompt in order to produce something that makes a statement. The assignment, for Professor Lise Friedman's Fall 2017 Arts Workshop, "Innovations in Arts Publications," was to develop a set of panels that made some sort of commentary on contemporary society. My goal with these three images was to translate the imagery of a crisis abroad into our immediate visual lexicon here in the United States. The imagery is stylized to make it easier for viewers to process what’s portrayed in the photos: grief, desperation, crisis. The journalistic photos we see of the same situation in the media can be too overwhelming to stomach. While creating these three images it dawned on me that being an artist is important. There’s a certain sort of science to producing imagery that will succeed, that will exist not just to be mindlessly consumed but to be savored and digested slowly."—Jordan Yasmineh