Described as an experimental work, Kent Sheely’s Frameworks (2025–ongoing) reanimates the visual grammar of early 3D video game modelling through a process that is simultaneously manual, sculptural, and painterly. Each composition begins with a stitched wireframe, embroidered directly onto raw canvas, evoking the skeletal geometry of polygonal modelling used in digital environments before textures, shaders, or physics are applied. These underlying meshes, typically invisible to players, are then painted over with acrylic, producing a surface that oscillates between the illusionistic and the structural, the pictorial and the procedural.
Here, the term “framework” refers to the unseen scaffolding that shapes how objects, avatars, and terrains appear in virtual space. By physically laboring over these frameworks, Sheely insists on their materiality, recuperating the body in a medium, digital gaming, that usually occludes it. The embroidered lines, often done in bright, synthetic thread, retain the angular precision of low-poly design, but their tactility subverts the computational sterility associated with game engines. In short, these are simulations of wireframes, elevated into an aesthetic as well as a conceptual strategy.
Fig. 1 Kent Sheely, Duck Ribbon, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing.
In Duck Ribbon (2025), for example, the polygonal silhouette of a goose bends into abstraction against a flat ultramarine background. The title hints at digital topology, the “ribbon” perhaps referencing the common 3D modelling technique used to animate wings or cloth, but here it takes on a handmade, even whimsical aspect. As with many of Sheely’s works, the irony is subtle: a goose, a domesticated icon of chaos in game culture (think Untitled Goose Game as well as Nintendo's classic Duck Hunt), rendered with reverence and minimalism.
Fig. 2 Kent Sheely, Escape, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing.
In Escape, the most overtly referential of the series, a stylized polygonal bird, stitched in neon blue, ascends above an oppressive grey cityscape, flanked by smokestacks and boxed architecture. The glowing red ring encircling the bird could be read as an apocalyptic sun, a forcefield, or a portal, ambiguous iconography borrowed from gaming HUDs and alert systems. It is not just an image of flight, but of glitch, rupture, or defiance: the bird’s departure breaks the rigid geometry of the city below. The work recalls Soviet Constructivist aesthetics, merging utopian design and the propaganda of dystopian regimes.
Fig. 3 Kent Sheely, Sandvich, from Frameworks, 2025-ongoing.
The third example, Sandvich, literalizes the absurdity of game logic. A floating sandwich, exploded into its component parts—olive, bread, tomato, cheese, meat—hovers in impossible suspension. The structure is architectural: each ingredient rendered as a folded polygon, exaggerated in its volume and physics-defying levitation. It evokes both in-game consumables (a staple of inventory mechanics) and the 'logic' of itemization in first-person shooters. One might think of Team Fortress 2’s infamous healing sandwich or games in which foodstuffs become tools, currency, or comic relief. But in Sheely’s treatment, the irreverent and the absurd has been formalized: the sandwich is now an object of reverent, Cubist still life.
Frameworks is a material critique of digital illusionism. By foregrounding the wireframe, usually hidden behind a glossy finish, Sheely breaks the fourth wall of simulation and invites reflection on the scaffolding of digital representation itself. After all, wireframes are a constant motif in his oeuvre. Consider, for instance, Impressions of Play (2024), collages of unstable wireframe structures composited into long-exposure game screenshots, homaging Rosemarie Fiore. Sheeley’s process merges computational syntax with textile labor, collapsing the binaries between code and craft, image and object, representation and infrastructure. These works render visible the visual epistemology of gaming: how digital worlds are structured, ‘stitched’, and experienced. By embroidering code into canvas, Frameworks literalizes the invisible and paints the procedural.
LINK: Kent Sheely
