GAME ART: THEODORE DARST & COLLIN LEITCH, ALL MANNER OF THINGS SHALL BE WELL (2018)
All Manner of Things Shall Be Well by Theodore Darst and Collin Leitch is a vertical video framed across two HD televisions about religion's aesthetics and ideology. The video incorporates footage from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. and 3D animation. As Ida Pruitt writes on the Brooklyn Rail:
Religious imagery punctuates the video’s landscape, which was partially built with footage lifted from the role-playing video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This open-world game allows players to freely explore its virtual realm and shape their own narratives, a feature Darst and Leitch exploited in the tradition of Machinima (a filmmaking technique where players use the graphics engine of a game to capture footage for a cinematic production). The artists are in dialogue with this practice, but elaborate on the richly textured aesthetic of Skyrim with originally rendered 3D graphics, manipulated video sourced from the internet, digital painting, and other techniques too inventive to pin down. The result is a frenetic montage of imagery that either fragments or evolves as soon as it begins to make sense.
Collin Leitch (b. 1993) is an artist and filmmaker living and working in New York. He earned a BA in Film & Electronic Arts at Bard college in 2016. He has participated in screenings internationally including Channels Video Art Festival in Melbourne (2017), Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn (2017), The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016), and has had a solo presentation of his work at Mothership, Woodstock (2016).
Theodore Darst (b. 1986) is an artist living and working in Manhattan. In 2017 he presented a solo show Cult Trash at Magenta Plains, NYC. Recently, Darst has presented work in “THIS KNOWN WORLD” at The Museum Of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA; and the Artists’ Film Biennial at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, England. Darst has exhibited his work in New York at East Hampton Shed, 83 Pitt, Microscope, The Museum of the Moving Image and in Chicago at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roots and Culture, Public Works, and MANA Contemporary. His first book, Cult Trash, was published by Soft City Publishing on the occasion of his exhibition at Magenta Plains.
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