GAME GENIE at Trestle Projects

March 21, 2015

in Curatorial Projects

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GAME GENIE

curated by Will Hutnick & Polly Shindler

Cameron Welch, Dots and Shapes, 2014, oil and acrylic on found textile, 50 x 46″

GAME GENIE

curated by Will Hutnick & Polly Shindler

featuring: Eleanna Anagnos, Sharona Eliassaf, Henry Samelson and Cameron Welch

February 4 – March 5, 2015

opening reception:

Wednesday, February 4, 6 – 9pm

closing reception:

Thursday, March 5, 6 – 8pm

Trestle Projects is pleased to announce GAME GENIE, a group exhibition of painting that explores the undefined space where physicality and digitalization overlap.

Game Genie was a supplemental tool for original Nintendo that provided a quicker and much easier way to beat the game at hand. The device plugged into your machine and transported your character into a different space and time. You were given the opportunity to avoid various levels and obstacles and bypass information in the hopes of completing the game sooner. The game – and your experience – was being edited as it was being played. New pieces and fragments were (re)constructed to reinvent the final outcome.

GAME GENIE explores the ways in which artists are investigating an undefined space between physicality and virtuality. By employing common digital technologies – and/or a computer-driven mindset – to create recognizable forms and shapes, the artists in GAME GENIE are altering and subverting the familiar picture plane, and questioning our own perceptions about space, in a way that is unexpected. Paint acts as a portal to, and away from, virtual networks. This gray area, this unknown, inter-dimensional space where physicality and digitalization overlap, is being challenged with a critical eye, making the viewer attempt to decipher whether something is painted, collaged, superimposed, digital. The artists are questioning what is there and not there, reconfiguring shapes and information through their exploration. Multiple and/or identical forms are created to exist in the same space and time, as if they had been copied and pasted from one surface (or screen) to the other. Rather than a strict copy, however, the forms and shapes at play are developed specifically and intentionally with the artists’ hand: through loose, sweeping, gestural marks; through incompatible colors forced to interact and harmonize, or produce static; to hand-drawn figures that undulate and shift between different perspectives and dimensions. These moments are an exploration of an unobtainable, “other” space, as well as a declaration of the present.