Grim Tales

America is riddled with problems. The pandemic has exacerbated the scale of those issues. Grim Tales is a collaborative project that shares and educates various issues. Since we are based in Los Angeles, we wanted to scale down the project to LA county. My group decided to take on homelessness, specifically in Skid Row. Homelessness in Los Angeles skyrocketed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Many outdated fairy tales have hidden meanings that can be used as a medium to communicate about issues. For homelessness, my group is using Little Match Girl as our base. I created an installation using various materials to show the relations between hypothermia and the unhoused. Unhoused people are much more likely to develop serious and fatal cases of hypothermia. Each Grim Tale group did a photoshoot. I acted as the match girl and so I created a yarn doll of myself. I surround myself with a blanket and hold an LED light that represents a match. The wooden figures on top of the box represent bridges. Unhoused people choose to live under bridges for various reasons, the most obvious being the weather. I added a shopping cart, a common association with homelessness, filled with bags of clothes. The space that unhoused people occupy is usually dirty, thus I scattered scrap near the tent.