Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (first image above) was a response piece to Barnett Newman's series of four paintings by the same name. (Which is itself a reference to Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was also a reference to the 1933 Disney cartoon song, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?).
Newman's piece has seen response pieces from other artists such as Philip Taaffe's We Are Not Afraid (1985), which only furthered my interest in the suggestive interactive nature of the series.
My exploration of this question saw its response in the toy-like associations with the three primary colors, and further questions the implied innocence of both toys (think toy guns, what have you) and the three hues. The selected objects entertain a range of social risks, fears, and value judgments. The result is an assortment of things that can cause harm in a range of ways (both physical and emotional) painted to be made toy-like or innocent, in turn challenging the ways we subconsciously or culturally label a thing as something to be wary of.
Documentation of Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (Me, 2016) in Stopping Points, Juried Exhibition at Littman White Gallery, February 2016; documentation of one of the four in Newman's series; Philip Taaffe's We Are Not Afraid.