The Scream 2023, video and custom oil painting
I found a teeshirt with Edvard Munch's The Scream with the addition of a piece of pizza and a UFO at a resale shop, some type of update to our buffet of contemporary anxieties to include Pizzagate and perhaps the Pentagon's UFO report. I purchased the tee shirt and then ordered a Wansview home surveillance camera and made a video by screen recording the live feed via the app on my phone, trying to get the painting in the right position above my couch while wearing the tee shirt. I thought mediating the painting from the tee shirt through a home surveillance camera was an appropriate next move in the lineage of the image's relationship to culture. The use of the security camera was not only a nod toward the current manifestations of cultural anxieties but also a wink at the history of the painting, referring to its theft in 1994 when two men broke into the National Gallery, Oslo, and stole the painting leaving a note reading "Thanks for the poor security."
The Scream 2023
The home surveillance company, Wansview, is headquartered and stores data in Shenzhen, China, which is the same region where the painters of Dafen Village reside. Retracing the map of my data, I ordered a custom oil painting of a screenshot from the video from the Dafen Painting Village, returning Edvard Munch's painting back to its original form after a chain of mediations and modifications.
The Scream 2023, 16"x9" custom oil painting ordered from Dafen Painting Village in Shenzhen, China