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Contact: Neil Hennessy, 646-202-3369
When: Opening Sunday, December 3, 6-9pm
Performance by Ms. Pac-Mondrian at 8pm
Show runs Dec 3-31
In the Airfilter series, household air conditioner filters are transformed into relief prints by letting dirt accumulate around a stencil pinned to the filter. The series focuses on dirty images that we subconsciously cleanse, and the first prints feature line drawings of wrestling boys.
In 'glitch art', a broken image file causes Photoshop to crash, creating an unpredictable psychedelic remix of the image. The subject is celebrity scandal: glitches in the image of public figures. In 'The Weekly Spam: Paris Hilton Has Bird Flu' collaborator Rob Read writes poems from spam referencing the famous heiress, which are illustrated by glitch images of the infamous sex video in layouts stolen from celebrity gossip magazines.
In 2003, after presenting the case against Iraq to the United Nations, Colin Powell held a press conference in front of a blue curtain covering the usual display of Picasso's Guernica. The 'Baghdad=Guernica' canvas illustrates the undesirable parallels by replacing each figure from the painting with an image of an Iraqi casualty. The half-size 6'x13' canvas marked the first anniversary of the speech in front of the US Embassy in Toronto, and makes its gallery debut at Laila.
A glitched video about black men shot by white cops will be presented entitled 'Dateline: Racist City Cops'. The video was recorded from a malfunctioning digital cable box during the television program Dateline.
The worst effects of age on a painting are blisters and cracks - 'Blister Painting' takes this death of painting as its subject. Small canvases are baked in an oven until the congealed paint rises in blisters and the thinly painted areas crack. The painting is delicately scanned face down on a flat-bed scanner. Finally, the image is inkjet printed at a much larger scale on canvas. The point-sampling method of the scanner greatly exaggerates the sense of depth so that the result is a striking abstract work ranging from intense close-up detail to far away shadowy color.
In the now famous game Pac-Mondrian, Toru Iwatani's iconic yellow sphere races around the canvas of Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' to the tune of the jazz he loved to dance to. In Ms. Pac-Mondrian, new levels are created based on maps of different cities and scored with original electronic dance music by local musicians. The first two levels of Detroit and Toronto are joined by the world premier of the new 'Tokyo Techno' level with music by Tokyo native Mitsuaki Komamura.
The next irreverent fusion of fine art and video games is Calderoids, where you dodge and destroy Alexander Calder's kinetic mobiles in the triangular ship of Atari's space shooter Asteroids. The ubiquitous mobiles we hang over baby cribs were originally conceived by Calder as fanciful models of the universe: "There is of course a close alliance between physics and aesthetics." Based on a physically exact model of mobiles in space, Calderoids frees you from gravity to fly around and zap Calder's sculptures in your cosmic spacecraft.
Play the games at the gallery in fully functional arcade cabinets modified from Asteroids and Ms. Pac-Man originals, or on the pbfb website.
Inspired by the outrageous costumes and antics of 80s London club god Leigh Bowery and the exuberant theatrics of contemporary videogame cosplay, The Ms. Pac-Mondrian Trance Dance Seance Performance reincarnates Piet Mondrian's spirit through ecstatic dance. As a psychedelic shaman, Ms. Pac-Mondrian performs dances a burlesque to the boogie woogie sound effects of the game. Guided by Mondrian's firm theosophical belief that he was an old soul reincarnated many times, the PBFB invite you to a kinaesthetic/synaeasthetic extravaganza to raise the dead and bring back the boogie. Performance begins at 8:00pm.
Contact: Neil Hennessy, 646-202-3369
The Prize Budget for Boys (PBFB) is an arts collective originally convened in Toronto in 2001 to make new media, performance, video game, literary, and fine art. Their first book, The Spectacular Vernacular Revue, was published in the Fall of 2004 by Roof Books (New York), based on a multi-disciplinary multi-media performance work that toured across Canada and the US from 2001-3. The original Pac-Mondrian arcade cabinet is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of the Moving Image (New York).
In addition to the Moving Image, their art has been installed at the MINE Festival (Denmark), the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, Art Metropole (Toronto), ArtSpeak (Vancouver), Helen Pitt Gallery (Vancouver), and Virus Arts (Toronto). In 2007, their work will be displayed at Pallant House Gallery (UK).
A selection of media that have featured the work of the PBFB: The New York Times, Glamour, Newsweek, USA Today, Marie Claire, Playboy, ARTnews, MTV, VH1, TimeOut New York, NY1, and Time Warner Cable.
The PBFB members are Mike Brown, Michelle Cross, Neil Hennessy, Ian Hooper, Mike Horgan, and Tristan Parish.
Mike Brown received his MFA in Electronic Art from the University of Cincinnati in 1994 on a full scholarship where he wrote his graduate thesis on technology and its relationship with religion. His work has beeen exhibited at Ars Electronica. At school Mike worked on artist Benjamin Britton's Virtual Reality version of the Lascaux caves, and taught classes in Interactive art, 2D and 3D digital art and 2D and 3D Animation. Following graduation, he entered the video game industry and has worked on several top ten games in the last 10 years. Mike is currently a level designer at Digital Extremes, the studio responsible for Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
Neil Hennessy graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor's of Mathematics in Computer Science and English Literature where he won the George W Hibbard Prize for Excellence in Shakespeare Studies. His poetry has been published in a handful of Canadian poetry journals and on subways and buses across Canada through the Poetry on the Way series, his interview with William S. Burroughs showed up in an anthology, his digital work has been published by UbuWeb (ubu.com) and Coach House Books (chbooks.com), and he is a literary editor with The Queen Street Quarterly. He currently works as a software instructor.
Ian Hooper graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts from Bishop’s University, where on the strength of his installation art pieces, he won the top prize for studio excellence. He continued to explore "artificial spaces" through his work with virtual reality and cybercafes at the University of Calgary where he earned his Master's in Industrial Design. He has worked professionally designing and printing everything from t-shirts and calendars to large-scale display signage and advertising for magazines and billboards. Aside from his artistic efforts, he has written about technology and culture for a variety of publications including MindVirus (A CD-ROM publication from Sydney, Australia) and Core Magazine (Calgary). Ian Hooper currently works as an information architect and user interface designer.
Mike Horgan received his Bachelor of Science with Honors from the University of Western Ontario. In addition to a degree in Computer Science with specialization in Software Engineering, he was awarded the University Gold Medal for top standing in his graduating class. With interests in computing, gaming, and psychology, he has been credited with AI programming on commercial videogames, worked on projects involving sensory entrainment, arcade-style reflex gaming, and database-driven community websites. He currently works as an AI developer for Digital Extremes, the studio responsible for Unreal and Unreal Tournament.
Tristan Parish edited two issues of The Capilano Review (2000), co-curated a show called 'Sift: The Reading Room' at Artspeak (Vancouver 2001), has had a critical piece on the show in Mix magazine, has been published in side/lines: A Poetics (Insomniac Press 2002), and was on the small mags panel at the TISH conference (Calgary 2001). His work has appeared in Queen Street Quarterly, Open Letter and a number of other Canadian literary periodicals. With Chris Walker he produced the long running art project Judy. Tristan currently manages an international outsourcing practice for one of the "Big 4" professional services firm.
General
Why combine art & video games?
Why would people want to play these games?
How have people responded to the games online? in galleries?
Have you had any lawsuits yet?
What other art video games do you have planned?
Where did you get the original Ms. Pac-Man and Asteroids arcade cabinets?
How did you modify the original arcade cabinets?
Calderoids
How did you decide to combine Calder's mobiles and the game Asteroids?
How do Alexander Calder and Asteroids mix art and science?
How did you program the physics of the mobiles in Calderoids?
Ms. Pac-Mondrian
Why are you resurrecting Piet Mondrian in a seance?
Why are you bringing Pac-Mondrian to dance clubs?
Why did you start dressing in drag as Ms. Pac-Mondrian?
How did Ms. Pac-Mondrian get kicked out of the art fairs and wind up in the tabloids?
Contact: Neil Hennessy, 646-202-3369