http://digitalarts.bgsu.edu/portfolios/krisa/BFA/index.html
“Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.”
Everybody has heroes. Some of them are real: parents, teachers, basketball stars, football stars, and military heroes like the Seals who killed Osama Bin Laden. Some of them are fictional: Batman, Superman, the Avengers. And somewhere in between there are movie stars like Chuck Norris, George Clooney, and Angelina Jolie, who are heroes on and off screen. Some of them you've met and know and love. Some of them you worship from afar. But the one thing that can said about heroes is that they create legends and legends have a special sort of power all their own. Legends create hope.
I've always found heroes fascinating, be they the heroes of tall tales or more modern super heroes flying off to save the day. When I was a child I used to listen to the tall tales my grandparents would tell me. These were stories of larger than life men and women who took on problems I had never heard of. As a child I knew nothing about pioneer life. I couldn't tell a corn seed from a wheat seed. I couldn't shoot a gun. The tall tale heroes were inaccessible to me until I heard about Mose the Firefigher. In my Grandfather's words Mose came alive. He was a recognizable figure, what child over the age of two doesn't want to be a firefighter?, and he lived in a place I knew: New York City.
But like everything else, the role of the hero in our society is changing. For my BFA project I decided to highlight that change. It is not, however, a change in the way a hero works, because a hero will always bring hope and save the day. The change is in how wide the audience is that the hero must attend. The character Mose was one that brought hope to the poor people of the Bowery in New York City. In my modern reincarnation of my beloved childhood hero I had him bring hope to more people and more situations that we see on the news everyday and make people feel so helpless: earthquakes, fires, and floods. These are still very relevant disasters today, more people are helped by the Red Cross because of fires than any other disasters, and more people are killed in flood than any other type of disasters. Mose can conquer these and bring hope.
Tall tales will never go out of fashion because, as people, we need hope. We need heroes.
Tall tales will never go out of fashion because, as people, we need hope. We need heroes.
