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.