E-Vapor-8 curator Francesca Gavin has published a 4-page article in Dazed & Confused magazine with an essay, and features on 5 artists included in the exhibition: Fatima Al Qadiri, Rhys Coren, Jeffrey Gibson, Petra Cortright, and Travess Smalley.
Role-playing games are commonly thought of—and disparaged as—forms of “escape,” ways of separating the self from reality. Steal Away Jordan (2007) by Julia Ellingboe is an RPG that challenges stereotypes of the genre while explicitly making escape a game-world objective: The player characters are slaves in the antebellum United States, and their goal is to be free. As in other RPGs, the characters are defined by a collection of traits coded in numerical values; the primary statistic in Steal Away Jordan is the character’s value on the slave market, measured in number of dice. “A young, attractive female in a Southern city or town, add two dice,” the rulebook says. “If you were from the Rice Coast in West Africa and were purchased by a rice planter in the Carolinas, your knowledge of rice cultivation would be particularly valuable.” Players are discouraged, however, from inventing highly valuable super-slaves, and the rulebook suggests a lengthy list of handicaps and demerits. “If you have a history of escape, you have been branded or whipped at some point,” it says. “These wounds carry the risk of infection, and mark you as a problem slave.” With its excerpts from slave narratives and reproductions of … Continue reading
In a time when most gamers’ experience with video games was the action-packed, quarter-eating world of the arcade, early role-playing games for home consoles, like The Legend of Zelda, offered a slower, longer, gameplay experience that could unfold over weeks and months. An important element in such games was the save point: a place where the character had to return before quitting so the player could pick up where he left off. In games from the popular RPG series Final Fantasy, the save point was often represented as a bed—a fitting choice, since beds are a space of comfort and daily return in everyday life. When the player brings his character to the bed and saves, the character ostensibly goes to sleep, entering the world of dreams: an invisible fantasy within fiction that blurs the potentials of the game world and the player’s world. Daniel Leyva—an avid player of the Final Fantasy series and other Japanese role-playing games—has materialized this ambiguity in his installation Save Point (2012). A child’s bed with gaming scenes projected on it stands as a post marking the viewer’s progress. It inverts the game’s modeling logic by bringing an element of a game into the space … Continue reading
It began at “In Real Life.” Curator Laurel Ptak brought several internet-based collectives to a Brooklyn gallery over the course of March 2009, and the exhibition ended with a reception where, while talking to a new acquaintance, I self-deprecatingly mentioned having played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid. My words made her eyes light up. “I have a proposition for you,” she said. Once she was certain that our mutual friends were out of earshot, she told me that she and a friend had been talking about playing D&D for almost a year, ever since news of the death of Gary Gygax, the game’s inventor, put the idea in their heads. They needed at least one more person to start a game. Would I be that person? I hadn’t rolled a twenty-sided die since 1994, and it had been nearly as long since I’d felt a desire to. But I immediately said yes. And once our campaign began, I immersed myself in the minutiae of D&D rules and lore, reading online forums on strategy and homebrew modifications to the game. It was nice to have a hobby. When writing about art is a freelance job, it sponges up your time. … Continue reading
We are incredibly honored to announce that Notes on a New Nature curated by Nicholas O’Brien was selected by Paddy Johnson, Editorial Director of Art Fag City, as one of the 10 Best Exhibitions of 2011. We couldn’t be in better company, alongside Alexander McQueen at the Met, Christian Marclay’s The Clock at Paula Cooper Gallery, and some of our other very favorite shows of the year. This marks two years in a row where we’ve received this honor. Last year, Paddy Johnson listed DUMP.FM IRL as one of the Top 10 Exhibitions of 2010, writing: “This is the art we’ve been waiting to see for the last 30 years.”
