Join the artist in conversation with Matt Morris as they discuss Petrovich’s new project, PNTG. Tracing the place of the siren in this body of work, this conversation will examine the historical and contemporary functions of painting in visualizing the political, responding to moments of global crisis, and acting as a foil to technology.

What does it look like to process and analyze the iterative digital specters of disaster, war, and police violence? What do the sirens mean for citizenship, for activism? What nascent ethics are proposed by the materialities with which this body of work apprehends these signs of our times?

Petrovich and Morris both approach these considerations as artists, writers, and educators—these multivalences will shape their dialogue and the invited Q&A to follow.

The images initially collected were used as stand-ins when a news outlet didn’t want to show us some particularly gory details — when, for example, a family of four was murdered, or as one headline put it: Blood Leaked from the Ceiling.

As the artist painted them, these stand-in sirens reminded him both of early lockdown — when blaring ambulances indexed the severity of the pandemic; and of later lockdown — with its mass protests against the epidemic of police violence. Sirens pair glowing enticement with obliterating overload, a combination that is designed to interrupt the ordinary, to signal an exceptional event. The moment of emergency becomes suddenly (and blindingly) visible.

But when the sirens begin to accumulate—as they undoubtedly have, in reality, on the doomscroll, and in our minds—they stop signifying temporary rupture and begin to establish their own continuity, a condition of seemingly uninterrupted emergency, this new phase of history we find ourselves in.

The sirens are the first set of works for PNTG and serve as its overture.

 Dushko Petrovich Córdova works across media as a painter, writer, and publisher. His current project, PNTG, identifies and collects emerging types of digital imagery and rematerializes them through a method of reverse-glass airbrush painting.