Autopyre
Recent
Autopyre
“This burning car indicates that violence has only just subsided.” - Mayo Thompson, lyric from the album Soldier Talk by The Red Crayola, 1979
The Autopyre series posits the burning car as a universally recognised symbol signifying the breakdown of order, referencing writers such as JG Ballard (in his speculative fiction) and Slavoj Žižek (in his critical writings). Sourced from low resolution internet images that have lost their original localised context, the series is rendered in the ’traditional’ medium of oil on canvas, establishing a tension between source and object. The images are divorced from specific geographic locations or events. What we see could be Paris or Baghdad, Belfast or Lagos. Context is not relevant, rather the action of fire on a universally recognisable consumerist unit of currency - the car - and the implicit breakdown of ‘normal' society.
- Ian Wieczorek 2015