Love Denied

Artist Statement

Love Denied

Ava

For my art piece I created a map of the world and identified countries where same sex marriage is illegal by painting them black. For the countries that allow gay marriage but still has problems with it, I painted them grey, and for the countries where it’s 100% legal, I left them white. I made the water part of the map blue and green with watercolor, so it seems like water.

My art piece demonstrates that there are many places in the world where people aren’t allowed to get married to the person they love. People aren’t allowed to get married, just because they want to marry someone of the same sex. I want people to look at these blacked out places and think to themselves, “What would it be like if I couldn’t get married to the person I loved?” I want people to put themselves into someone else’s shoes and see how it feels. I know that you can’t just go to one of the places that are married demand them to change, but they can at least see how it would be if that were them.

Something that inspired me to focus on this topic was an article about a man that was fired from the job he loved because he was gay. I also found a test some people did. They made many applications, but the “people” (fake applications) that were gay, or supported gay people weren’t chosen. Things like that make me sick to even think about. People are discriminating against other people just because they are different. Things like that happen every day to innocent people, and it’s wrong. When I thought more about this, the first human right that we studied from The Universal Declaration of Human Rights came to my mind. It states, “everyone is born free and equal.” I thought of this because we are all humans, so why treat anyone different?