Expanse and Distraction

January 18, 2018

Expanse and Distraction

Siri Dokken, June 9, 2017.

A cartoon by Siri Dokken operates in infinite space. Each cartoon opens the scene on hand to a existential problem humankind is facing. Global warming for one, or how we treat each other, neglecting to see the human within fellow humans.

Siri Dokken, January 10, 2018.

Siri Dokken works across the picture plane, never with a perspectival depth. Hers is the vast and extensive space of modernism with no intention of creating an illusion. The picture plane is the magnifier to a problem at hand.

What is more, we are being led beyond the physical boundaries of the picture plane only to realize that there is no divine intervention to make all compositional lines meet such as they would in a classical composition. There is no salvation.

Such as the youth above, seen in his state of being an unseen entity, battered beyond every known limit. He is already out there and not in front of us.

Siri Dokken, January 13, 2018:
- How do you feel now?
The danger of losing the #metoo-moment to whining rather than change.
Note the sharp bend, this one is really angling for therapy.

The sheer pain of realizing the situation of the youth, a mere child. Siri Dokken incorporates two compositional principles onto each picture plane: the grandeur of her picture plane and the pain created in her beholder.

The sharpness of the latter incites to look further: how does she nail it so precisely each and every time?

When composing along the picture plane, Siri Dokken incorporates a delay. Trump as roped in the soiled flag and his self-declared menial, Stephen Miller three times brush the Golden Ratio of their picture plane until right at the very point where they could have defined the fourth and final one when instead the rounding off of the peacock fades into a mass of white nothingness by the declaration of Miller.

Siri Dokken, May 28, 201.
The constant of addressing equals.
There is no sectioning, nor distraction in this one,
This is a focus onto a massive sameness of no beginning or end.

Trump's head is but one example of a profile, which as drawn by Siri Dokken constitutes a horizon of its very own, unable to take in or enter into exchange with other beings. Her protagonists throw out declarations and in their utter un-connectedness, they constitute another layer of delay.

Such as in the drug exchange below. The scene is divided into three sections of privilege in society, with the girl in the shadow from the tree is yet another painful non-existence. She is no further away from us than the others are, but their noise across their two sides of life, which cannot even begin to understand one another, leaves her as the forgotten one; wringed into the pain of her life.

Siri Dokken denotes her tactics of delaying distraction. In an interview October 2017 (to the Norwegian national radio, NRK, and thus in Norwegian, sorry!) she explained her use of distraction as a means of incorporating time into the spectator's process of seeing: Taking in takes time and by the time (in this instance it is that very "time" she is specifying) the assertion is grasped, it is happening within you. As such it is perceived as genuine and personal being your response to your own critical reflection. Satire has the ability to break through our first defense work, as she ascertains.

Siri Dokken, September 16, 2016:
- .... and it is organic, right?

That is the grand cartoonist speaking, who dares take on that dialogue all the way into the head and heart of the beholder. Courage, responsibility and artistry in one.

For that very reason we have a professor of cartooning! At long last! Siri Dokken will be lecturing and tutoring at Kunsthøgskolen (The National Academy of the Arts) in Oslo, Norway the next four years, made possible economically by the foundation Fritt Ord (Free Word). Imagine the inspiration she will mean to a whole generation of art students.

Imagine the impact from her presence we shall be detecting for decades to come.