"Flare (Oceania)" 2022

John Gerrard

Born 1975, Tipperary, Ireland. Lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Pronouns: he/him.

 

"Flare (Oceania)" 2022

Custom 33” slim line screen with gunmetal frame, edition 5/5 + 3 AP

 

Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

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Flare (Oceania) is a subtle meditation on an existential threat: the spectre of the climate crisis. Depicting a flag composed of smoke and fire emerging from the ocean, this flare might signal an emergency, a distress call, or the waning of nationhood under Petro-capitalism. In gas and oil extraction, the practice of ‘gas flaring’ involves burning natural gas into the atmosphere, producing black carbon that directly contributes to the melting Arctic. The expression to ‘flare up’ in anger implies the ignition of a heightened individual or collective emotional response—which might fuel a call to action.

 

Employing real-time computer simulation, Flare (Oceania) uses a generative algorithm to render an image of hot gas rippling through the atmosphere. As is characteristic of Gerrard’s practice, computer game engines are used to create procedural images, emphasising the entangled histories of computation, extraction, and climate change.

 

Flare (Oceania) conflates multiple timescales, spanning ancient geological time to the present moment, to raise questions about the future. Aligned with Pacific Tongatapu time, the work indexes its cycles of night and day, and the rising and setting of the sun over the Moana (ocean). Gerrard’s attentiveness to the present in a geographically specific context registers the looming existential threat to low-lying Pacific nations and the realities of rising sea levels. The work grew out of conversations with Tongan climate activist and artist Uili Lousi, who contributed photographs of his ancestral ocean taken from a boat in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. These photographs were used as reference imagery for Gerrard’s digital construction. Flare (Oceania) reminds us how the rise of nations and Petro-capitalism has been predicated on the depletion of resources, expended within a few generations, and creating irrevocable consequences for the future.