The Playground Series created by Francisco Diaz + Deb Young Beneath the surface of “The Playground Series†is an underlying tension cloaked in innocent fun. We created this series as a visual metaphor for the condition in our highly stratified world where social relationships reflect a low degree of integration and meaningful interaction coupled with a high degree of isolation between individuals in a community environment. Each image in “The Playground Series†is fashioned by montaging together dozens of unrelated photographs into a coherent piece that has the feel and look of a single capture. But, the more the viewer stares at each individual work, the more they start to realize something is just not right. The unreality of each piece begins to be felt by the viewer, which adds to the overall tension of the series. The tension the viewer feels both in the specific imagery and where the works start to seem “less real, unusual†encourages the notion that events in which we are engaged in everyday life, increasingly tend to feel random and disconnected from a community, often with apathy and alienation being the result.
