UNDRGRND ARTIST: THREE PANEL CRIMES
AUGUST 5TH, 2022
Each week artists are commissioned for a piece of art through the UNDRGRND Grant Program. 100 NFTs are minted and are randomly airdropped to UNDRGRND Membership Cardholders. To find out how you can be featured as an UNDRGRND Artist check out our Discord.
Beginning. Middle. End. That’s it, and it’s enough.
Three Panel Crimes strips down a story to only the necessary. This process allows him to find what works and play with the story. The limitations imposed force the artist to choose impactful images that compress the narrative into dense but digestible panels.
To tell a complete story in three panels would be enough for most, however, Three Panel Crimes manages to do so with no dialogue as well.
“I prefer opening up the pieces without dialogue,” says Three Panel Crimes, “because visual language is universal. Anyone can understand and participate in my comics, no matter where they come from or what language they speak.”
By working within the self-imposed restraints of creation, Three Panel Crimes has created an unrestricted form of communication between the creator and the audience. When the dialogue freely flows, ideas become boundless in their reach.
“The biggest thing that I hope to communicate is that comfort and safety are not the same things,” he says. “I can be unsafe and very comfortable, and very uncomfortable and safe. Safety is objective. Comfort is subjective. Confusing them has led to all sorts of problems.”
We see this subjective safety come to life in the series Balloon Girl. The first panel in each piece shows the silhouette of a young girl holding a balloon and standing in front of a strange, cloaked, grown man. The second panel is an image of the balloon drifting off into the sky as a result of the girl letting go. When presented with these two panels one can imagine that something terrible occurred.
However, we find in the last panel that the girl was never in any danger. Through a variety of escalating violence, we see the girl was never in any danger at all. Decapitation, electrocution, stabbing, beating and even telekinesis, all play a role in the mysterious man’s demise.
The illusion of safety is not relegated only to a fictionalized world though. Three Panel Crimes also explore the reality of our world and the illusions of safety we take for granted. Three Panel Crimes depicts the terror of no-knock warrants in ICE-T. In the series Institutionalized, the audience is taken from arrest, incarceration, to release.
Each of these pieces speaks differently to the viewer depending on their background, socioeconomic status, or the color of their skin. Our safety in the world is something many of us take for granted and fail to see how our social constructs play a role in that safety. Whether this is the intention of the art or not due to the lack of text and the openness of the image, the audience is left to their own devices.
The conversations around these topics come pre-loaded with preconceived notions, prejudices and biases that stripping them down to their essence serves as a starting point. The art of Three Panel Crimes fits perfectly In a world where our illusions of safety are challenged every day. By creating a universal language to communicate these points of conflict our society has created, hopefully, we can begin a dialogue towards changing these illusions of safety realities. For now, we’re still at the beginning of that story.
