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IPODS AND DEGRASSI: RSU POSTER CONFUSES

By Kris Baker

Are you interested in running for a position on the Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) executive? Are you a silhouette? If not, according to an RSU poster, the job may not be for you.

The RSU’s nomination poster is arousing confusion around campus, particularly among students who aren’t part of the silhouette community. The poster calls for nominations for the upcoming RSU elections and features three silhouettes. The Eyeopener assumed the figures to represent a woman, a person in a wheelchair and a gay couple. But we wanted to know if this imagery was clear to students.

Megh Desai, a first-year aerospace engineer student, guessed it’s a picture of “A guy in a wheelchair giving some sort of lecture to a couple and a basketball player,” adding, “What is this?” More confusion was sparked by the imagination of students.

“It’s a group,” pondered Jamie, a first-year graphic communications management student. “The man in the wheelchair was a drummer in his Degrassi days.” Some students attempted to decipher the ad with a philosophical perspective.

“I see acceptance. I see friendship. It looks like they’re in a gym,” Mellissa, a second-year student, said.

Other students were so baffled by the poster, they felt overwhelmed with negativity. A first-year electrical engineering student, Peter Adams, said “The man in the wheelchair has a cast on. The girl doesn’t care. She’s like, ‘Too bad for you.’”

Eventually, students’ ideas of what the poster represents escaped all logic.

A film grad who called himself Dan, said it was “a rock group with a drunk drummer in a hospital scene with an escaped (set of) twins being pursued by a nurse. One twin had his arm ripped off by a man in a wheel chair.”

Dismissing this idea, Veronika Patrenko, a fourth year applied chemistry and biology student believed the poster was a picture of “a woman staring at a guy in a wheel chair and two people hugging in a help centre for mental complexes.”

She immediately changed her mind. “On the other hand, it looks like an iPod ad.” Patrenko wasn’t the only person tempted to purchase an iPod after viewing the poster. Chris Small, a second-year theatre student, called the poster an “iPod commercial to raise awareness.”

Kelsey Stasikiak felt lost and abandoned with the idea that the poster pictured a foot race with a man in the middle cheating. “He’s riding a unicycle near two (conjoined) twins. One fell on the other who stopped growing.”

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