Breaking & Entering: Art and the Video Game
A group show featuring works by Cory Arcangel, Brody Condon,
Jon Haddock, JODI, Paper Rad, RSG and Eddo Stern
New York, December 1, 2005— PaceWildenstein is pleased to present
Breaking and Entering: Art and the Video Game an exhibition of work by
seven artists working at the forefront of the digital medium. The
digital, increasingly the medium of our everyday lives, is redefining
the way we interact with and perceive the world around us in much the
same way as the railroad redefined our geographical and cultural
landscape at the end of the nineteenth century. The works in this
exhibition map a new visual terrain, a terrain grounded not in material
reality but in numerical sequences of which the visual is just one of
many possible expressions. The digital is a realm that has only just
begun to be explored and the artists represented here are the first to
have broken into this new space. Treating the video game as a primary
visual expression of the digital, they make use of the skills they
honed as players to disrupt, reorganize and rewrite the visual surface
in novel ways. For each artist and group, breaking becomes a way of
entering.
Comprised of large-scale installations and projections, the exhibition
space will be transformed into an inhabitable gamespace. Here,
observers become players and video games an entryway into the
ever-expanding domain of the digital.
Included in the exhibition will be a new multi-channel installation by
Cory Arcangel as well as Bomb Iraq, a found game piece that marks a
departure in his work. JODI, true innovators of the medium, will
present a life-size quad screen installation celebrating the chaos and
beauty of play as process. Brody Condon’s ethereal projection traps
multiple figures of Elvis in a pink-hued death dance and Eddo Stern’s
Deathstar, a narrative contrived of internet games in which various
acts of violence are committed against Osama bin Laden, offers a
haunting display of the violent underpinnings of nationalism. The
entire series of Jon Haddock’s seminal Screenshots will be on display
as will a new work by RSG, mapping the player’s impossible path through
the terrain of World of Warfare. An installation by the
collective Paper Rad, peopled with characters grabbed from sprite
sheets, will allow viewers entry into a free-standing funhouse
wallpapered with moving images and posters.
Patricia Hughes, Assistant Curator at the gallery, organized the show
and wrote the accompanying catalog essay. In it, she remarks, “...we
migrate between worlds that borrow nothing from one another. The
digital realm, grounded in sequences of 0s and 1s, remains materially
distinct from the real trees-and-roots space in which it has been
implanted. These artists, conditioned by video games to act upon their
environments, find ways to reassert the self in this new
world....Products of a generation whose cultural habits and memory have
been very much formed by interactive experience, they construct their
own reality out of the detritus of imagination.”
A public opening will be held on December 9 from 7-10 pm which will be
followed by a night of performances, scheduled to take place in January
2006. Please refer to our website as more information becomes
available.
Additional material on Breaking & Entering: Art and the Video Game
is available upon request by contacting Jennifer Benz Joy, Public
Relations Associate, at 212.421.3292 or via email at
