100 Pink Smoke Flares

100 Pink Smoke Flares is a series of ephemeral outdoor installations from Raphaele Shirley in which 100 smoke flares are ignited simultaneously, momentarily obscuring the landscape behind them. Presented jointly with Deep Water Literary Festival, on the occasion of the festival’s theme, metamorphosis, this transient mass of color interrogates the impermanence of both natural and urban environments, underscoring their continual transformation under human influence and societal shifts. The work engages with the aesthetics of disappearance and emergence, foregrounding the fragility of landscapes in the Anthropocene. This body of work serves as both a poetic and urgent meditation on environmental distress, the sublimity of nature, and its precarious temporality. The installations operate as performative gestures, wherein the act of activation becomes integral to the work’s meaning, emphasizing temporality and instability as fundamental conditions of contemporary landscapes. Live musical performances accompany the work, amplifying the emotional underlying context of the work.

Raphaele Shirley is a Franco-American multi-media artist practicing in New York City and Callicoon, New York. Her work ranges from video, painting and technology based sculptural works to public art, place-making social interventions and performance. Her solo or collaborative projects have been presented in venues such as S.R. Guggenheim, The Queens Museum, the Museum of Moving Image (New York), the NCCA, the 2nd Moscow Biennale (Moscow, Russia) and the Hermitage (St. Petersburg, Russia), and Art Basel, Miami to name a few. Her collaborators range from renowned composers to theater directors, architects, and technology experts from all fields. Currently she is collaborating with Montreal based architecture firm Atelier Apsis for the development of sustainable public arts projects. Their project TEAG was chosen among the finalists for the Land Ary Generator call for proposals for Manheim, Germany. Shirley is recipient with Algis Kizys of the Wave Farm Grant 2023 for their performance piece “20F” developed during the pandemic in Callicoon, NY. Shirley has been the recipient of several grants from the Norwegian Arts Council and received awards for her collaborative projects. She was artist in residence at Harvest works NYC with Rhys Chatham and GH Hovagimyan (2016) and The Arctic Circle (2009/2010).