Flames Roar (Stavanger Aftenblad)

My proposal for Stavanger Secession 2025 is a project consisting of two parts, a painting based on the format of a double page in Stavanger Aftenblad and a spread of the same image (a screengrab of a closed caption reading [flames roar]) printed on newsprint and inserted in the style of pull out poster into the normal circulation of the same newspaper. 

Closed captioning for TV and film describes audio in text form, filling in missing information considered integral to the plot line for people who are for some reason unable to hear the original sounds. The painting Flames Roar is based on a screen grab with this closed caption in white (unpainted, the color of the preprimed canvas) while all other visual information has been replaced by black paint. 

Without any visuals what we are left to imagine from the phrase [flames roar] could be the aftermath of a terrible accident, a car wreck or a house fire turned into an inferno. 

The flames that are burning around the world at the moment however - whether literally as in the wildfires in Los Angeles or the bombed apartment buildings in Kiev, or metaphorically with the collapse of the liberal order and the rise of populism and autocracy - while often passed off as accidents are usually nothing of the kind. Rather, they are the effects of specific actions and policies and of information either lacking, being willfully ignored or purposefully withheld. 

A popular current meme depicts a dog wearing a hat sitting at the kitchen table while the room is engulfed by fire with a speech bubble that says “This is fine” - and isn’t this exactly what we see as we open the newspaper in the morning and read the articles: descriptions of the flames roaring all around us while we pretend it’s all fine? 

There is some affinity between the two close-to-obsolete phenomena of painting and the printed newspaper, not to mention the pullout poster, and the materiality of the black which makes up 95% of the paining will differ in an, in my opinion, interesting way between the two iterations of the image- paint on canvas and ink on newsprint. Also, one aspect of the artwork will be a traditional, unique object while the other will be freely circulated to be stumbled upon while going about one’s everyday life.