Sustained Investigation: How does our imagination change the way we perceive the world?

I chose it because I feel like there’s a lot of creative freedom that comes with the question. You could think of a lot of different ways that you can interpret that question.

[To me, my SI] means diversity and variety and a lot of different ways of thinking. You can approach this from a lot of different perspectives. I took it from a personal perspective; it reflects some of the things that I feel in my head — negative emotions or positive emotions and stuff like that. I portray those things in my artwork, or [the] ideas that I have just like in this one. 

Then a question that branched off of that was “How did the things that we see make us human?” and then Ms. Wengel asked me, “Do you think animals imagine or is this only a human experience?” 

So then I did some research. And at first [I thought] they could [imagine] but then [I found that] only some can, but they don’t recognize it. In some instances, they’re able to see the past and the future, but none of [them], visibly to us, have imaginary friends or anything, or appear to have seen a figment of their imagination at one point. But some of them do dream. And so the question that I raised from this was how does this enrich the experience that they have? And are there limits to our perception of the world from our point of view because we don’t understand animals that much?

So then, I became interested in creating a comparison/contrast between human and animal interaction. Humans weigh the moral value of human lives over those of animals, because of the increasing expansion of ethics as people start to care more about extending human rights towards animals and applying the same principles (for example, veganism). We get caught up in a moral dilemma. This is basically what is portrayed in this picture. It shows that there’s a butcher who’s human, but he’s cutting up human parts, and there [are] animal customers.