EVENT: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH (FEBRUARY 2—16 2024, ONLINE)

Blood Paintings

digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024, Australia

Created by Georgie Roxby Smith

Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings series merges digital gaming spaces and physical art. Each piece comprises three distinct components: a machinima documenting repetitive violence against GTA V pedestrians, intimate selfies showcasing the finished abstract paintings that violence yields, and hybrid digital/physical prints combining in-game imagery with organic artistic styles. This unique, multi-format presentation offers insight into both the meticulous creative process and the provocative contrast between clinical virtual acts and tactile human artistry.

Georgie Roxby Smith is a pioneering digital artist who uses gaming, AI, video, and performance to probe modern identity and reality. Her work focuses on representing marginalized groups, especially women, in online environments. Artworks like The Fall Girl and 99 Problems [WASTED] expose violence against female video game characters, critiquing the misogyny embedded in gaming worlds. Smith’s bold, confrontational, socially-engaged art has exhibited globally and earned prestigious grants and residencies. As virtual and actual boundaries blur, her practice reveals hard truths about identity and systemic bias persisting digitally. Blending emerging tech and mass media, Smith dispels notions of liberation in our increasingly visualized world. Her immersive works harbor the probing questions that will propel digital art to its next avant-garde evolution.

EVENT: CHRISTIAN WRIGHT (OCTOBER 14-27 2022, ONLINE)

SON

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

Created by Christian Wright

October 14 - 27 2022

Introduced by Matteo Bittanti

vral.org

 

Christian Wright reframes painting and cinema through the medium of the video game. Inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and by the extended duration of slow cinema, the artist references historical events and religious themes, but also fictional narratives, sagas and myths of the near future, introducing an expanded narrative that defies easy categorizations. Part of a trilogy, Son investigates the spiritual through the technical, using the notion of ritual as a point of departure. By emphasizing the in-between, the interstitial, and the liminal, the work transforms inactivity into revelation, emptiness into wholeness.

Christian Wright (b. 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne) is a digital media artist working with video games and animated assets to blend cinematic and machinima visual languages. Through this frame, he looks at how the boundaries of normal play are stretched by the performative actions of players themselves. Whether it be the intimate physical interactions of online multiplayer, the choreographed quest for perfection of speedrunning, or the mimetic act of digital cosplay within character creators, Christian places community driven gestures at the forefront.

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EVENT: FEDERICA DI PIETRANTONIO (JULY 22 - AUGUST 4 2022, ONLINE)

but I wanna keep my head above water

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 10’ 30”, 2022, Italy

everynight i try to find the light but sometimes its too cold

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 1’ 01”, 2022, Italy

everynight i try to find the light - prélude

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 00’ 51”, 2022, Italy

Created by Federica Di Pietrantonio

viewer discretion is advised

Wet, steamy, and sticky. Federica Di Pietrantonio takes the viewer into her neon lit lavatory. In this humid, slushy environment, gender identities become fluid and seemingly solid architectures suddenly splinter. The camera indulges on a virtual nymph’s expression as water drips slowly and then faster. Moments of intimacy are shared. Crevices are explored. Surfaces are scrubbed. This highly immersive experience will leave you soused.

Federica Di Pietrantonio (b. 1996) studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Rome. After receiving her B.A. in 2019, she did a residency at KASK (Ghent, Belgium), where she developed the project Vacation Spot with The Sims. In 2017, Di Pietrantonio was selected for Mediterranea 18 Young Artists Biennale and the following year she began a collaboration with Spazio In Situ as an artist and web designer. Her work has been exhibited in Italy, Belgium, and Portugal. She currently lives and works in Rome.

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EVENT: JASON ROUSE (JUNE 10 - JUNE 23 2022, ONLINE)

KOSSOFF FLEES UKRAINE

digital video/machinima (2160 x 1440), color, sound, 31’ 12”, 2022, Northern Ireland

Created by Jason Rouse

Machinima, landscape painting, first-person shooters, walking simulators, and photogrammetry. Jason Rouse’s new artwork is a triumph of remediation as it incorporates, repurposes, and transforms a variety of media, genres, and aesthetics. It is simultaneously an art history lesson and a meditation on current events delivered via Unity 3D. As the title suggests, this work is about Leon Kossoff, one of the most influential British painters of the XIX century, who was also the son of two Ukrainian refugees fleeing persecution during the 1903-1906 pogrom. Kossof Flees Ukraine reconstructs that miraculous escape through the forests and mountains of Europe, while updating the narrative to another tragedy, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia. The outcome is a document about the past that speaks about the contingent moment.

Jason Rouse (b. 1985) is an Irish artist living and working in Cardiff, Wales. In Rouse’s work, digital and traditional arts converge, creating unexpected results. Rouse has painted game landscapes, developed interactive games, and experimented with generative spaces. Rouse has been a finalist with Lumen Prize for Digital Art, exhibited at the inaugural Westmorland Landscape Prize and selected for the 2020 BEEP Painting Prize. He has received a Wales Art International grant for SWITCHed, an exchange program between Arcade Cardiff and Galerie RDV, Nantes. His album of solo Irish traditional music on Uilleann Pipes has won critical acclaim from both press and peers.

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