Missing Pet Project | Moby Westwood

The Missing Pet Project: 'Dave'

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This poster series takes the classic "missing pet" notice and turns it on its head. The “pet” itself is a nightmarish cartoon character that hunts down anyone embodying that too-cool-for-school uni vibe. I played with dramatic, movie-poster style typography, deadpan captions, and over-the-top illustrations to gently poke fun at those who’ve gone too deep into performative detachment. It’s part visual joke, part social experiment: will people laugh or cringe when their carefully curated nonchalance gets called out? Either way, it was fun to make, and I love that it sits somewhere between satire and storytelling.

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Artist Statement

What makes someone good? We often associate goodness with charity, loyalty, or moral conviction. But those things are slippery, often tangled up in performance or circumstance. What marks a good person, I think, is their ability to laugh at themselves. To recognise that everything they do, every outfit choice, every coffee order, every unsolicited political opinion, is at some level, deeply ridiculous and carry on unbothered. Dave exists to test that. A revolting and terrifying yet unequivocally fictional creature that feeds on those who most perfectly embody the campus stereotype.