Arcade!
Art System
October 25 to October 27, 2002
Curated by:
Derek Mainella
Featuring works by:
Matthew Bennett, Jubal Brown, Jason Hallows, Andrew Kidder, Derek Mainella, Anna Jane Mcintyre
Painting at Arcade
It's 3pm on a Saturday afternoon.
My detour into Chinatown to find the elusive* Art System gallery has led me up a flight of stairs and through a very pink door. I seem to vaguely recall my old roommate telling me that Art System puts on good parties.
As I enter the gallery, I feel the alcoholic stickiness of last night's opening reception party tug at the sole of my shoes while a young man half-heartedly sweeps plastic cups and straws into piles. (I think it's the curator, Derek Mainella, but I don't ask.)
"Sorry for the condition of that display," he tells me while pointing to a wall of disorganized pixel art paintings (possibly his own, see below), half of which were in a pile on the floor. "I ran out of sale stickers last night and was selling them right off the wall."
Looks like I missed an interesting night -- especially since the flyer was encouraging 'Pac-Man era attire'.
I wasn't too sure what to expect from Arcade!, a survey exhibition of arcade-related art work. It did cross my mind how geeky this idea of having a gallery show dedicated to video game art was. Yet, just as the curator proposed with this show, it is truly a reflection of my generation.
The so-called geeks are turning out to the ones making the big bucks and, considering how mainstream computing and gaming have become, the geeks are most certainly going to be shaping our visual landscape of the present and future.
left: paintings by Matthew Bennett | right: (non)pixel art paintings (Derek Mainella
In terms of Arcade!, most works had a retro-80s look. Some of the artists chose to monumentalize video game art by increasing the scale and transferring each pixel onto canvas through paint. There is something truly ritualistic about meticulously painting straight-edged squares one after another.
Matthew Bennett, co-founder of Mind Control Studios in Toronto, decided to approach it differently and made Metroid** into erotica (see above, left). I guess it's every boy's fantasy to have a woman who can kick alien butt. And with that heavy armour, it's even easier to imagine the mystique. (Of course, now is the time to point out how only one of the six featured artists is a woman.)
While I don't want to underscore the influences of video games on representation in a digital culture, I considered Arcade! as only a nice blast to the past. An interesting re-mediation of low art versus high art but overall uninspiring for my current New Media practices. Nevertheless, I still went home and played some Metroid.
* elusive since Art System doesn't even seem to have a website... very strange for a gallery that showcases a lot of multimedia events.
** actually, I'm not too sure if it's Metroid but I can't think of any other female video game characters.