February 26, 2008
For Immediate Release
The dates of the senior project planned by UVSC Art and Visual Communications student Josh Mendenhall have been changed. The project will now be displayed March 10-14, a week after the previously-planned project. It will still take place at Olympus High School, located in Salt Lake City at 4055 S 2300 E, and will focus on the dangers of drug use.
Mendenhall, a Saratoga Springs, Utah native, will construct five portraits of teenagers, each portrait measuring eight feet tall and eight feet wide. The portraits will be made by pushing colored plastic cups through the openings in a chain-link fence. At the end of the five-day drug-awareness week, two of the portraits will change into skulls. Accompanying text will explain that there are two drug related deaths every hour.
The project will, Mendenhall hopes, make students consider the reality and gravity of drug use. “I never knew drugs were so common in our high schools. There have been ‘just say no’ programs out there, but I think now the message needs to be a little stronger,” Mendenhall said. “Death is the reality of it. Death is where drug use will lead them.”
The Olympus High School student body will assist in the project, getting them involved in the message Mendenhall has in mind. Mendenhall will plot out where each cup goes in the design and students will assist him in constructing the images.
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