This project investigates the disappearance of Flash, a dog which has been missing for over six years. Since then, posters and billboards enquiring with the public about Flash’s whereabouts have popped up all over South Wales, bordering A-roads, motorways, and railroad tracks. Alongside, a lively, vast, and ongoing online community has sprung into being, obsessed with solving the mystery of the dog’s disappearance and keeping Flash’s memory alive.

This project is an investigation into one man’s desperate search for his lost best friend, alongside an interrogation of issue-based online communities and the conspiracy theories, scam calls, and online hate often found in such spaces. The display mimics a lonely sleuth’s office, trying to make sense of clues through supposed crime scene photographs and other ephemera. It also aims to make viewers question the veracity of the pictures by mixing photographs of the actual signs alongside images parodying the usefulness of such desperate public pleas.

The backdrop to this project is the so-called dog boom, that is, the meteoric rise in demand for dogs during the pandemic, which resulted in a surge in prices paid for canines and a related string of pet thefts. The ongoing search for Flash is an idiosyncratic response to this modern phenomenon.