Consent

For my print for the final project, I decided to focus on a social justice issue that is very important to me, which is the issue of sexual assault. While sexual assault has been talked about at the high school I attended, and I remember going to the sexual assault presentation at the beginning of this year during my freshman orientation at Scripps, I realized that the topic of sexual assault is not an ongoing conversation. Besides the mandatory talks about sexual assault that I have been to, the only other time that I hear sexual assault being talked about is if there is a news story about someone being sexually assaulted. That is not to say that people don’t discuss sexual assault, but I think that what people don’t realize is how often sexual assault occurs every day both on and off of college campuses.

I wanted to focus on sexual assault, specifically the idea of consent because I wanted to spread the word about how important the word “no” is when it comes to consent. When people see my print, I hope that they will keep thinking about the idea of consent and sexual assault after they have looked at my piece. For this print, I decided to overlap two pieces of texts in different colors. The first layer of the print is three lines of the word no in maroon ink, where the middle no is the biggest because I wanted it to stand out the most. I picked wooden blocks to print with because I knew that they would make a big imprint on the piece of paper, and would help make the statement I wanted for my piece.

The second layer of text which is in dark grey is a statistic about sexual assault that reads “every 2 minutes someone is sexually assaulted.” I used the Scripps metal typeface to spell out the statistic. The reason that I decided to do a more general statistic was that I didn’t want to use a statistic that was only about women because anyone can be sexually assaulted, and I thought it was important to also convey that message. I wanted to overlap the two pieces of text because I didn’t want the attention of the statistic to distract from the “no,” but I still wanted people to be able to read the statistic and think about what it means.

-Charlotte Ostrow, Scripps '22