Profiterolé of Doom, 2023

Wry humour, compassion, cinematic allusions and falter-ego characters combine to skewer the poignant absurdity of human folly and hydrocarbon hubris in relation to anthropogenic climate collapse. Meta-textual fables filter through Spaghetti Westerns and Polish film posters in a fluid interplay of myth, mind and screen. Profiterolé of Doom riffs on the harbinger trope of horror films and Greek Mythology’s Cassandra - cursed with a gift of prophecy but ignored and mocked as mad. A stranger in a strange land, perplexed by cognitive dissonance, he imagines himself as a provocative hybrid of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the vengeful panda in the Panda Cheese commercials, but as in Duane Michals’ Christ in New York (1981), he doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. The work also engages with the mechanics and implications of cognisance and looking. If we become what we focus attention on, how do we maintain agency and hope despite overwhelming evidence that our reckless addiction to petrochemical privileges hastens climate chaos?