GAMESCENES

EVENT: HUIDI XIANG, WHEN HELD PROPERLY, (MARCH 31 - MAY 14 2023, BROOKLYN, NYC)

 

when held properly,

Huidi Xiang

March 31 - May 14, 2023​

Tutu Gallery

Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, New York City

 

Huidi Xiang's debut solo exhibition, aptly titled when held properly, offers a delightful exploration of video game aesthetics and pop culture references. Drawing inspiration from iconic titles such as Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, and Super Mario Bros, Xiang presents a series of colorful and conceptually engaging works that blur the lines between digital and physical realms. At the heart of the exhibition lies a playful homage to Super Mario Bros' infamous Shoe Goomba, as a green boot takes center stage in one of the exhibition's most visually striking pieces. Through Xiang's masterful use of color, texture, and form, the humble shoe is transformed into a vibrant symbol of pop culture iconography, inviting viewers to reflect on the social and cultural significance of video games and their enduring impact on contemporary art. April Z, Tutu's gallery curator, offers a profound and insightful analysis (see below) of the multiple layers of meaning present in the exhibited artworks.

 

​press release

Tutu Gallery announces sculptor Huidi Xiang’s first solo exhibition in New York: when held properly, opening Friday, March 31, 2023, with 6 new sculptures made this year tailored for the gallery’s home base. Charting the journey of her ongoing immigration and introspection on her role as a minority female in late capitalism, Huidi uses a mixture of symbols from video games and popular culture as her language to describe how affective labor metamorphoses into physical and internal harm by the larger system we exist under. 

This body of work was initially conceived from Huidi’s preoccupation with Shoe Goomba, a shoe-wearing, mushroom-shaped monster character in Super Mario Bros. A late addition to the game, Shoe Goomba can be defeated by the standard jump move, or, a stealth attack from below which then grants Mario possession of A Goomba’s Shoe (also known as The Shoe), allowing him to safely move through spiked grounds and monsters. Extended to real-life living in New York, putting on a good pair of shoes prompts a mental switch from nesting to facing the outside world, provides comfort on the go, and can even be used to deceive others about the wearer’s socio-economic class.

Huidi Xiang, when held properly, Tutu Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, installation shot (Courtesy of the Artist)

Huidi draws parallels between game simulation, animation, and immigrant assimilation as analogies for many survival strategies around the vicious cycle of personal caretaking, growth, and the eventual weaponization of a person. In power-up take-out, The Shoe, life-sized and spray-painted black, becomes the container for an enlarged, standing plastic knife, a normally frail gadget she cuts takeout food with in between busy work schedules, and, as she jokingly put it, perhaps the most powerful gear readily available for fighting. Such hidden anxiety about a lack of resources in an unfamiliar environment is further signaled by hold my inventory tight and right, a 4’ handmade woodcut board riskily balanced on a silicon banana peel, inspired by the inventory space design in Animal Crossing New Horizons. In order to start building tools which then build furniture and shelters on a deserted island, the player must rely on limited bag space to collect sticks and stones from scratch. A carrier like this, hopefully with a few things already in it, can also be swung to fend for oneself in unforeseen situations.

The multi-use of scarce assets encourages creativity, but also complexes the intention behind every simple act. Leaning against the wall, timbering the dream house embeds a small monitor framed in a shovel, displaying a video collage of Villager (originally a character from Animal Crossing)’s two Movesets in Super Smash Bros. Down special Timber shows the character shoveling to plant a seed, watering it until it becomes a tree, then peculiarly cutting the very tree he had grown in order for it to fall and hit the opponent; final smash Dream Home, he pays a team to build a house around the opponent proceeded by detonating it at the celebration of its completion. The gravity is my best frenemy, a life-sized concrete anvil on a silver chain placed above the mantelpiece, is drawn from props designed for Wile E. Coyote by ACME Corporation in Looney Tunes. A lucky charm to the artist, it enunciates the fanatic mindset that, to be considered worthy, even an instrument to produce weapons must be effective in attacks itself.

Such constant reexamination of straightforward utility, safeguarding merits, and concealed lethality maps an unavoidable disintegration of the singular self. In hare come the glitches, an axe, which can be used to chop wood and warm up the living space, or, to potentially harm domestic partners, merges into the Shoe and turns into the tail of Bugs Bunny, reflecting a disordered amalgamation of worlds, personalities, objects, and functions.

In the flower need no water, a chip-looking white lily in a glass jar pumps water into a basin sourced from Chinatown, which firmly stands on three triangulating concrete shoes, while a small plastic-watering-can-turned-into train loops around the rim. Modeled after Lily of Valley in Animal Crossing New Horizons, this white lily symbolizes the system’s promise of final recognition after one naturalizes by wearing the shoes, learning the language, gathering the resources, avoiding the dangers, making the work, knowing the right people and projecting the power. It is a perpetual motion machine: the water will come from the trophy in the shape of a delicate flower and take care of all things.

April Z, Tutu Gallery

 

Huidi Xiang (b. 1995. Chengdu, China) is a sculptor currently based in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Huidi received her MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 and her BA in Architecture and Studio Art from Rice University in 2018. In her practice, Huidi makes sculptural objects, installations, and systems to examine world-making processes and the coexistence of multiple contexts and narratives in late capitalism. She uses her work to cultivate alternative narratives to speculate and investigate the usually invisible working mechanism, rules, and power structure hidden behind pop cultural symbols and scenarios. Huidi’s works have been exhibited internationally, including OCAT Biennale at OCT Art & Design Gallery, Shenzhen, China; KAJE in Brooklyn, NY, USA; Lydian Stater in Long Island City, NY, USA; LATITUDE Gallery in New York, NY, USA; Contemporary Calgary in Calgary, Canada; Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China; Miller ICA in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and more. Huidi has also participated in some artist residencies, including NARS Foundation International Residency Program (2022), ACRE Residency Program (2021), the Millay Colony for the Arts (2020), and Project Row Houses Summer Studios (2016). She is currently an AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

LINK: Huidi Xiang

LINK: when held properly, at Tutu Gallery

EVENT: WORLDBUILDING: VIDEO GAMES AND ART IN THE DIGITAL ERA (JUNE 10 2023 - JAN 15 2024, METZ, FRANCE)

Theo Triantafyllidis, Pastoral, 2019

 

Worldbuilding: Video Games And Art In The Digital Era

Centre Pompidou-Metz
1 Parvis des Droits de l'Homme
57020 Metz
France

Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at the Serpentine Gallery, London

press release

Certainly, this exhibit focuses on an activity worth reckoning with. In 2022, 3.03 billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—played video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist asserts, this hobby has become “the biggest mass phenomenon of our time. Many people spend hours every day in a parallel world and live a multitude of different lives. Video games are to the twenty-first century what movies were to the twentieth century and novels to the nineteenth century”. Around a hundred years ago, in his book Homo Ludens, the historian Johan Huizinga theorized that play is a basic drive of humankind. Bringing people together in new ways, he contends, play is the source of culture.

More recently, in his book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that games, particularly video games, are a distinct type of art which “let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own”. As such, gaming has the potential to unleash powerful psychic forces. Video games have proven to be an effective tool for the development of training and strategy. Indeed, scientists have made good use of video games simulating biological systems to speculate on the possible origins and destination of life. Accordingly, video games as a digital art form offer a means for an existential quest beyond the embodied physical world and into the multiverse. By their very nature, they open the potential to imagine and build new worlds.

Several of the featured artists in the exhibit began making work that refers to video games as early as the 1980s while most of the others were just born around that time. For the works in this show, artists have addressed video games in various ways. Some have adapted their themes and visual style to make videos. Others have modified, hacked, and subverted existing video games. Finally, some have created their own video games. As Hans-Ulrich Obrist writes, “traditionally, video games were created by a small and insular group of people…producing games with a very limited perspective. This is now changing rapidly… Artists are increasingly developing the technical ability to create [their own] virtual worlds of diversity and inclusion”. Through these means, the artists are taking this format beyond pure entertainment value to probe social, political, and aesthetic questions. While video games have been the topic of numerous exhibitions in recent years, most of these highlighted their legitimacy as an artistic medium or focused on aspects of “game art”.

Worldbuilding is the first transgenerational, multinational show of this scope to examine how contemporary artists are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their chosen form of expression. In so doing, this exhibit presents a plurality of voices and a multitude of perspectives.

With works by Peggy Ahwesh, Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, Ed Atkins, Meriem Benanni, David Blandy & Larry Achiampong, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Basmah Felemban, Ed Fornieles, Sarah Friend, Kim Heecheon, Institute of Queer Ecology, Rindon Johnson, Keiken, Lawrence Lek, Gabriel Massan, Lual Mayen, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Frances Stark, Sturtevant, Theo Triantafyllidis, Suzanne Treister, Angela Washko, Lu Yang, among others.

LINK: Worldbuilding

See also

EVENT: SIMONETTA FADDA (MARCH 31 - APRIL 13 2023, ONLINE)

GAME OVER

One channel video (SD, 676x540), color, sound, 4’ 27”, 2002 Italy

Created by Simonetta Fadda

March 13 - April 13 2023

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

Driving at night in the video game-like suburban French city of Enghien Les Bains can be an exciting or demoralizing experience, depending on the driver or, perhaps, on the filmmaker. Simonetta Fadda’s carscapes are both delirious and hyper-real, suggesting a toxic convergence of realities.

Born in Savona, Simonetta Fadda is an artist, educator, essayist, and translator. Her teaching activities include the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin and Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan. Since the Eighties, she has been working with video art. Her artworks are featured in public and private collections in Italy and in Europe. She participated in major international events such as Movimenta – Biennale de l’image en mouvement, projet Mondes Flottants: Grandes Images, Nice, France (2017) and Parallel Program of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Institut Français d’Istanbul, Istanbul (2013). In Italy she was featured, among others, at Festival del Nuovo Cinema di Pesaro, Pesaro – Italy (in We Want Cinema: cinema e video di ricerca 2018, and in Satellite 2016) and Bergamo Film Meeting, Bergamo – Italy (2010). A prolific writer and critic, Fadda is the author of the seminal Definition zero: origins of video art between politics and communication (Costa & Nolan, 1999), the first Italian study on video as a medium of art and political activism, which was reprinted in an expanded format in 2017 by Meltemi Edizioni. In 2020, Franco Angeli published her new book, Media and art. She also translated into Italian and edited Gene Youngblood’s seminal book Expanded Cinema.

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EVENT: SARA SADIK'S XENON PALACE: CRYSTAL ZASTRUGA (FEBRUARY 22 - APRIL 28 2023, ROME)

Sara Sadik
Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga
February 22–April 28, 2023

Basement Roma
Viale Mazzini 128
00195 Rome
Tuesday–Friday
2:00 pm–6:30 pm

press release

Basement Roma is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Italy of the French artist Sara Sadik, Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga.

Born by a wide collaboration between public and private institutions, Sara Sadik’s exhibition will then move to the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, with a three-day performance (April 2023) before moving—with a second chapter of the show—to the Kunsthalle Lissabon at the end of June 2023.

Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga is a multimedia installation resembling a futuristic hookah lounge, a place far from the real world where the artist explores the magical dimension of childhood that takes shape in adulthood. Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga is a parallel and somewhat hallucinogenic world inhabited by fantastic smoky creatures, the Xenons, which appear from the fumes of hookahs. Through an immersive environment, packed with videos and sculptures, the exhibition takes us into the suspended dimension of Zetrei, the main character, played by Émile-Samory Fofana: a lonely man who has lost his family and friends, forced to live in a foreign, dystopian and alienated world, and that only by spending his days at Xenon Palace finds his haven of peace, capable of soothing the loneliness and sadness of his own existence.

“When speaking of Sara Sadik’s work, there is often talk of beurcore: in a sense, a reinvention of Afrofuturism based on the experiences and cultural references associated with the Maghrebin diasporas. But care should be taken not to reduce her work to an aestheticizing of urban cultures. This bias constantly threatens contemporary art by acting as a passageway between marginal or peripheral modes of life and the universe of commerce or publicity. How to pay justice to such work without tumbling into a descriptive exercise or a sociological explanation?” (Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Stella Magliani-Belkacem, Sara Sadik, CURA. 38, The Generational Issue, Spring-Summer 2022.)

Clearly focused on the themes of integration, identity, and marginalization in a still deeply discriminating society, Sara Sadik’s work features some of the central themes of social policies centered on institutionalized racism and its process of de-symbolization.

“The cultural and religious repression of the Islamophobic republic not only aims to exclude but also to foreclose any feeling of community conveyed by symbolism. This is the objective when the right-wing evokes so virulently and obscenely a Judaeo-Christian society: while the dominant benefit from a symbolic set of references, the oppressed are condemned to being stereotypes.” (Ibid.)

Halfway between fiction and documentary, everyday experiences, biography, video games, science fiction and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work creates initiatory stories in which young characters move eagerly within an identity process of physical and mental transformation.

Sara Sadik was born in 1994. She lives and works in Marseille. Recent exhibitions include Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (DE); Biennale de Lyon (FR); Crèvecœur, Paris (FR); CAC Brétigny (FR); Manifesta 13, Marseilles (FR). Her work is included in various institutional collections, including Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin / Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Centre National des Arts Plastiques. In 2023, Sara will be part of L’Almanach 23, Le Consortium, Dijon (FR).

LINK: Xenon Palace: Crystal Zastruga

 

GAME ART: DIMITRIS GKIKAS's GAME: ENDLING II: MNEMOSYNE UNIT-01 (2023)

Endling II is a walking simulator game that explores the aftermath of a mass extinction. The player controls Mnemosyne Unit-01, a hyper-creature containing the DNA of all known eukaryotic species, as they navigate a deserted, post-apocalyptic Earth. In the course of the game, the DNA strands struggle to coexist harmoniously, leading to humorous beatbox battles between them. During these battles, the player temporarily loses control of the creature, which starts behaving as a non-playable character (NPC).

 

Endling II can be downloaded from the game's homepageor Itch.io.

 

 

Dimitris Gkikas (b. Athens, Greece) is a Berlin-based new media artist and designer. He uses found materials to tell science fiction narratives through multiple media including video, net art, video games, performances, and installations. His work has been displayed internationally at institutions such as the UZWEI in Dortmunder U (DE), Akademie Schloss Solitude (online/shortlisted), 19th Media Art Biennale WRO (PL), Ars Electronica X.ART Global Gallery (online), Kunstverein Tiergarten (DE), ADAF (GR), Vector Festival (CA), FILE Festival (BR), Transmediale Vorspiel (DE) and The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale (online)

 

LINK: Dimitris Gkikas

EVENT: SØREN THILO FUNDER (FEBRUARY 24 - MARCH 9 2023, ONLINE)

 

EVERYWHERE

Digital video/machinima (720 x 328), color, 11’ 33”, 2007, Denmark

Created by Søren Thilo Funder

In Everywhere, we witness a lone figure navigating through a bleak and surreal urban environment, evoking a sense of isolation and alienation. The desolate terrain appears to be both familiar and foreign, presenting a disorienting experience for the viewer. The man’ continuous movement and evasion of unseen obstacles within the virtual realm challenge conventional notions of escapism, offering a fresh perspective on the concept as an unending cycle of seeking liberation from an undefined void. The piece’s cyclical nature serves as a commentary on the paradoxical nature of escape, as the runner’s repetitive journey highlights the futility of attempting to break free from the inherent boundaries, constraints, and power dynamics of digital media. Through this haunting work, the artist invites us to reflect on the interplay between virtual and real-life experiences, and the inherent limits within the world of gaming.

An artist who specializes in video and installation, Søren Thilo Funder, creates thought-provoking works that blend various cultural tropes, socio-political issues, and popular fictions. These narrative constructions operate within a delicate membrane where fictions and realities intersect, generating fresh interpretations and new meanings. Funder's oeuvre is steeped in both written and unwritten histories, as well as a deep awareness of the paradoxes and complexities of societal engagement. His art explores temporal displacements, nonlinear storytelling, and the emergence of new, unconventional forms of memory. Through his work, Thilo Funder creates immersive spaces that enable unpredictable encounters with the political, temporal, and recollective. He invites the viewer to challenge their preconceptions and explore the unexpected, creating a dialogue that is both deeply personal and universally relevant. Funder received an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The School of Art and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently finishing a Doctorate program in Artistic Research at The Art Academy, Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen in Norway.

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EVENT: REFIGURED (MARCH 3 - JULY 3 2023, NEW YORK)

Rachel Rossin, still from The Maw Of, 2022. Web-based animation with augmented reality (AR). Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its artport website and Kunst-Werke Berlin Institute for Contemporary Art AP.2022.1. © Rachel Rossin

 

Refigured

Curated by Christiane Paul

March 3 - July 3 2023

Whitney Museum
of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
New York, NY 10014

press release

Refigured, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 3, brings together five installations by leading artists working in the field of digital art to reflect on the ways technology intersects with and influences our ever-evolving identities, underscoring the dynamic between digital and physical artworks and blurring boundaries between them.

Featured artists include American Artist, Morehshin Allahyari, Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, Auriea Harvey, and Rachel Rossin. Drawing from the Museum’s collection and including digital video and animation, virtual sculpture, and augmented reality, the installations in this exhibition respond to the various forces that form identity and engage with the concept of “refiguring.” Sculptures are presented concurrently in digital and physical space alongside animations that escape the confinement of screens and reach into the gallery. Constructs of identity, self-representation, structures of oppression, and colonialism are explored through a variety of lenses and mediums. Some artists investigate the ways identity is reflected in the structures of artificial intelligence and computer interfaces, while others consider how selfhood transforms in online environments and ancient cultural myths.

Refigured will be on view March 3–July 3, 2023 in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery, a space that is accessible to the public free of charge and often highlights the latest emerging talent and innovation in American art. Three works in the exhibition are also accessible on artport, the Museum’s portal dedicated to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art, and can be directly launched through a QR code. This exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Experimenting with the idea of ‘refiguring’ is at the core of the works presented in this exhibition,” says Paul. “Through practices of appropriating material forms and reinventing them, the artists are challenging what it means to construct or shape identity.”

“Under Christiane’s leadership, the Whitney has long been dedicated to building an important collection of digital art,” says Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. “With Refigured we will shine a spotlight on this key area of our holdings and some of the most innovative artists working in the field today.”

American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates video, installation, new media, and writing to consider Black labor, visibility, and antiblackness within digital systems and the internet. Their legal name change to American Artist represents the basis for their practice and affirms blackness as descriptive of an American artist while simultaneously erasing identity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” remains anonymous online. Mother of All Demos III, American Artist’s installation in Refigured, alludes to the historical underrepresentation of the Black workforce in Silicon Valley. The installation features a mold of an Apple II computer—the company’s last model with a black home screen—coated in dirt, with liquid seeping out of the keyboard and handprints stamped on each side. The physicality of the computer sharply contrasts with the sleekness of Silicon Valley, commenting on how ideologies influence design choices and digital interfaces.

Morehshin Allahyari’s hypertext narrative The Laughing Snake was commissioned for artport in 2018 and will be presented in-gallery as an installation including a sculptural component. The work is based on the myth of jinn, supernatural creatures from Arabian mythology, to explore the status of women and the female body in the Middle East. Allahyari is an artist, activist, and educator whose work addresses the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. Employing technology as a theoretical toolset, the work documents and reflects on collective life struggles faced today.

A collaboration between artists Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :)))))) is a four-channel video installation centered on a chatbot examining the politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. The chatbot was developed by Microsoft in 2016, and its

learning and language imitation were influenced by aggressive trolling on platforms like Twitter. Within hours, these influences led the chatbot to use genocidal, homophobic, misogynist, and racist language, and it was shut down. For the installation, the chatbot is resurrected as an avatar to reflect on life after AI death and contemplate the experience of being stuck inside a neural network and the “apophenic” pursuit of patterns within information and algorithms.

Debuting both online and in the exhibition, Auriea Harvey’s SITE1 is the latest commission for artport. SITE1 is an illusionistic online space and the origin site of sculptural characters the artist has been working on over the course of many years. This work will be on view alongside Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis), the virtual and physical sculptures that represent the “origin story” of Harvey’s online identity. The sculptures embody the artist’s virtual avatar and her working process, which combines clay sculptures, digital 3D modeling, and video game and software development. Harvey’s digital sculptures are the core of the work, and she sees the physical sculptures as an extension of the virtual pieces.

Rachel Rossin’s THE MAW OF, a recent commission for artport that launched in 2022, is a transmedia story that unfolds across multiple platforms and formats and reflects on the alterations our bodies and minds experience with technology. Rossin, a multidisciplinary artist and established pioneer in the field of VR, blends painting, sculpture, new media, gaming, and video to create digital landscapes that focus on entropy, embodiment, and the effects technology has on our psyche. This work investigates the relationship between humans and machines, highlighting technology’s evolution from a tool to an extension of the mind and body.

LINK: Refigured

EVENT: TO ANCESTRAL FUTURES (JANUARY 25- MARCH 12, GUYANCOURT, FRANCE)

To ancestral futures
From ancestral knowledge to digital
26th of January – 12 of March 2023
Exhibit space of Guyancourt
Opening on the 25th of January

Curated by Isabelle Arvers

press release

The global games market is still dominated by Europe, the United States and Japan.The exhibition “Aux futurs ancestraux” adopts a decolonial perspective on art and games in order to echo works conceived on the periphery of this global and globalizing culture. “Aux futurs ancestraux” immerses us in other types of representations, cities, landscapes, narratives and cosmogonies, conceived and expressed in other languages, and seeks to decolonize our imaginary through the co-construction of narratives born of the encounter between oral tradition, endogenous knowledge and the virtual universes of video games.

This necessary dialogue between these different modes of knowledge requires a paradigm shift. Science and human thought are no longer the only sources of knowledge; it is now possible to think of knowledge “beyond the human” (Eduardo Kohn). “This implies that nature thinks, that animals think, and that non-humans can teach us techniques and knowledge, by changing our perspective. (Viveiro de Castro).

Between photo installations, drawing, performance, video installations, immersive, interactive and video game, an exhibition that invites us to reconnect with what connects us to our ancestral futures: the living.

Artists line up

High in the Sky and Beneath the Stars, Laura Palavecino, (AR), interactive installation

Laidaxai, Daniela Fernandez, (AR) video game

Paramo, Eulalia De Valdenebro Cajiao, (CO), Installation drawings video

Water Divinity, Henri Tauliaut (Martinique), Video game

Atuel, Matajuegos, (ARG), Video game

Coca para comer, Aniara Rodado, (CO), Installation, Performance

Epiculus Garden, Tania Fraga, (BR), Video Installation

Infinitree, Mbaye Camara (SN) & Isabelle Arvers (FR), Machinima

Isabelle Arvers is a French artist and curator whose research focuses on the interaction between art and video games. She studies the artistic, ethical and critical implications of digital gaming, and explores the creative potential of video game piracy. As a curator, she focuses on video games as a medium for artists. In 2019, she is touring the world of art and games in non-Western countries to promote notions of gender and sexuality diversity, as well as geographic origin, focusing on queer, feminist and decolonial practices.

LINK: To Ancestral Futures

EVENT: LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL (APRIL 28 - SEPTEMBER 17 2023, LIVERPOOL)

LuYang show at the Zabludowicz collection, London. (Credit: David Bebber)

LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL

April 28-September 17 2023

FACT Liverpool
88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ

 

Tokyo-based virtuoso LuYang astounds in a monumental opening of FACT Liverpool's 20th anniversary program with an exhibition of multimedia, playable video game works that transform the gallery into an interactive retrofuturist arcade. LuYang Arcade Liverpool invites visitors to embark on a journey through the prodigious artist's eccentric digital spaces, which merge the realms of anime, video games, and sci-fi. LuYang's interactive works are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking, immersing visitors in a world that is at once dark and bizarre. These works of art probe the concept of 'living on the internet,' inviting us to abandon binary understandings of identity, time, and space.

In LuYang's own words: "Creating a game is like constructing your own universe. The works exhibited in my solo show at FACT are interactive works - game works - from my art practices. The digital spaces I create are a meeting point of Buddhism, popular culture, and my research into neuroscience and technology, designed to stretch the exploration of morality, the mechanics of the human body and mind, and transcendence beyond the binary. Welcome to my worlds."

This upcoming exhibition is a testament to the power of video games as an art form, and a must-see for those interested in exploring the intersection between technology and art.

LINK: LUYANG ARCADE LIVERPOOL

GAME ART: ASHLEY ANDERSON, INTERMEDIA ARTIST

 

Ashley Anderson, Study for Still Life with Skull and Panties, acrylic on canvas, 2022, 11 x 85 inches

Ashley Anderson, Still Life with Skull and Panties, acrylic on canvas, 2023, 24 x 20 inches

 

Pixel art, with its roots in early video games and computer graphics, has emerged as a potent and compelling force in contemporary painting, offering a fresh and dynamic approach to the medium that reimagines the language of traditional art forms. Pixel art's use of a small color palette and precise, modular, scalable compositions creates a sense of play and experimentation that is at once nostalgic and contemporary. The canvas becomes a portal to the past and the present, creating a powerful sense of anachronism. The pixels themselves are the building blocks of the image, giving the artist a remarkable degree of control over the visual structure of the work. Through this precise, pixel-based approach, the artist is able to convey a remarkable level of detail and intricacy, which creates a sense of immersion for the viewer, drawing them in with its seductive combination of structure and pattern.

Pixel art operates in a sort of liminal space between digital and analog media, combining the handmade with the machinic. The artist working with pixel art within a system of rules and limitations imposed by the pixel grid, yet also imbues each individual pixel with a sense of individual character and idiosyncrasy, creating a unique visual language that is both systematic and expressive. Pixel art's embrace of the computer as a creative tool challenges conventional notions of painting, highlighting the inherent tensions between the handmade and the digital. As the pixel becomes the elemental block of the image, the artist must contend with questions of scale and resolution, as well as the inherently grid-like nature of the medium. Yet, in spite of these limitations, pixel art is able to produce works that are lush and evocative, with a sense of tactility and texture that belies its digital origins.

One of the most interesting and talented artists working with the medium of video game and painting in the style of pixel art is Ashley Anderson. Currently based in Atlanta, Georgia, Anderson has had a varied and fascinating journey, marked by an extensive range of professional roles and personal experiences. He is a practitioner of a special kind of intermedia art, a term that indicates a set of artworks and practices blurring the boundaries between traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpture, literature, music, theater, dance, video game and film. Moreover, the term "intermedia" reflects the idea that these works exist in the space between different media, rather than conforming to any one particular medium.

Point in case. Consider this example:

Ashley Anderson, Clouds, oil on canvas, 2015

Anderson's Clouds - a clear reference to Cory Arcangel's appropriation of Super Mario Bros (2002) via modding - was created by mixing cyanotype and pixel art. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that uses a photosensitive solution containing iron compounds, typically ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, which is coated onto paper or fabric. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the iron compounds are reduced to a ferrous state, creating a blue-colored image. The process was developed in the mid-19th century and was used for engineering and architectural blueprints, but it also gained popularity as an artistic medium. Today, cyanotype is often used by photographers and artists for its unique blue tones and experimental potential. In this case, it's perfect to evoke the sense of artificial blue of the original video game appropriated by Arcangel and now recontextualized through a different technique.

One of my all time favorite of his is the series Shinobi Marilyn (2012) after Andy Warhol

Ashley Anderson, Elephant Woman #2, 2012, 9-piece gel transfer print on panel, 12 x 12 inches

Now, what happens when you mix Clouds with Marylin?

Ashley Anderson, Super Mario Clouds, Digital collage print, 2012 Edition of 3 24 x 24 inches

More pixel work by Anderson is available here.

Ashley Anderson: Growing up in a small town in central Georgia that bore the scars of Sherman's infamous march to the sea, the artist developed an early appreciation for the legacies of history and the interplay between past and present. With family members who contributed to the building of America's infrastructure, challenged racial barriers, and worked in public service, the Anderson's upbringing instilled a deep sense of social awareness and responsibility. Drawing on a diverse range of cultural influences, his paintings dispaly a playful and idiosyncratic aesthetic that bridges the realms of popular culture and high art. Inspired by everything from classic Warner Brothers cartoons to the visionary science-fiction of Moebius, Anderson has developed a style that defies easy categorization. Anchored by a deep respect for Modernist painting and an abiding fascination with the creative possibilities of technology, the artist's work is marked by a restless and inventive spirit. In an unexpected twist of fate, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the artist into freelancing, providing a newfound sense of creative freedom and the opportunity to fully pursue their artistic passions. Through their various professional roles and life experiences, Anderson has remained steadfast in their commitment to the transformative power of art, guided by their father's sage advice to "support your art until it can support you!"

LINK: Ashley Anderson (All images courtesy of the Artist)