Sirens

work by Dushko Petrovich Córdova

March 1 – 30, 2025

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 P

Opening Reception

Saturday, March 1st
4 – 7 P

Join us in celebration of the opening of Dushko Petrovich Córdova’s solo exhibition, Sirens. 

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 them 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. He is a co-founder of Paper Monument, which has published numerous critically acclaimed books, including Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. Petrovich has also produced Adjunct Commuter Weekly and The Daily Gentrifier under his personal imprint, DME. He has written about art and visual culture for many publications including n+1, Bookforum, and the New York Times.

His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationally and internationally—including Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and Gallery 400 in Chicago—and has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, The New Yorker, and the New York Times, among many others. Petrovich currently serves as professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His current project, PNTG, identifies and collects emerging types of digital imagery and rematerializes them through a method of reverse-glass airbrush painting.