EVENT: FUMI OMORI (JUNE 2 - 15 2023, ONLINE)

HOME SWEET HOME

machinima/digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 2’ 35”, Japan, 2023

Created by Fumi Omori

Home Sweet Home explores personal memories and their translation into physical architecture through Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With a history of frequent relocations, the artist captured their rooms in photographs, preserving emotional connections to past spaces. Animal Crossing, a beloved game providing an idyllic refuge during the Covid-19 pandemic, allowed the artist to craft personalized rooms reflecting their personality. This project questions the impact of translating real-life spaces into the virtual realm. Employing photogrammetry, the artist reconstructs their past homes in the game, blurring boundaries with imaginative architecture. The interplay between virtual and physical layers offers a fresh perspective, showcasing a unique visual hacking method. Automating realities on the virtual plane reveals the intricate relationship between our fragile understanding of reality and memories. Digital reverie becomes an avenue for escapism, confronting the present, future, nostalgia, and denial.

Fumi Omori navigates the crossroads of the cultural diaspora with her transcendent visual language. Currently nearing the culmination of her master’s degree in photography at the esteemed École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland, Omori’s diverse experiences serve as a potent source of inspiration. Born and raised in Japan, the artist spent over a decade living in prominent American coastal cities (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco) before gravitating towards the medium of photography. Her previous stints as a perceptive graphic designer and discerning art director have indubitably permeated her artistic vision.

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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