Video Game Art Museum (2014)

Video Game Art Museum (VGAM) is constructed with art objects appropriated from the backgrounds of video games. In their original context, these works function as proxies, or simulations, of art. By recontextualizing them into a virtual gallery, VGAM playfully refocuses attention onto the works themselves, exploring the intersection of art and simulation, and satirizing recent institutional forays into the subject of video games and art (see the Smithsonian's The Art of Video Games and the Google Art Project).

Your Painting Is in Another Castle (pictured above) takes its name from Super Mario Bros., in which the protagonist crushes enemies, navigates deathtraps, outwits bosses only to be greeted by a proxy-princess and the text, "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!". The exhibition features works which reference/mirror the art historical canon.

The entirety of current collected digital works are accessible in the Tumblr-based Video Game Art Archive: http://videogameartarchive.tumblr.com

These projects have been written about in AV Club, Animal NY, and German design magazine PAGE.

More images available on request.

For GOAL, Nipo-Brazilian artist Alice Shintani created work examining land conflicts between real-estate speculators and individuals/collectives resisting displacement, with specific focus on such gentrification in conjunction with the 2014 FIFA World Cup preparations. With the construction of new stadiums in the poorest and most densely inhabited zones, land previously designated for public housing was converted into a private complex of shopping and convention centers, sparking massive protests. The work mostly consists of collaged digital composites of photographs documenting this conflict, screen shots from the video games 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil and River Run (1982), the virtual space of VGAM itself.