The Pitbull's Garden
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Bora Akinciturk, Ben Quinn, Hyun Jung, Alake Schilling, Cory Papalardo, Jake Kent
The underbelly of a rendered world holds mostly emptiness. What keeps the body afloat is a single plane, a string of yeses repeated over and over, a series of on/off switches creating the illusion of solid ground. Occasionally, vestigial renders remain in the final consumer-ready game. They stand as rare accumulations in a largely vacant world, hidden intentionally or not.
In the videoOff Camera Secrets, Dark Souls III, Boundary Breakby Shesez, we immediately behold the figure of the Firekeeper, an npc inserted as a waystation, an animated visual device for the game’s level-up mechanic. Her eyes are hidden in a silvery adornment, part blindfold, part crown. Shesez moves the camera closer and says,
“...whenever a character’s face is hidden in any game, it drives me crazy. I need to know whether or not they have a face underneath. And most of the time the answer is no….”
He navigates closer until the surface of the blindfold gives way revealing two fully-rendered eyes. As he attempts to move closer still, the nose vanishes and the hollow interior of the character is exposed. He plays at the border of her skin, passing through it slowly at various angles. We watch the eyes jump in and out of the frame with the waltz of her idling animation, her shallow breaths bending her strangely at the waist.
Boundary Breaktends not to marvel at the novelty ofbreaking the boundaryand instead searches for the refuse stashed behind the veneer. In this case, Shesez is seen doing both simultaneously. To view the eyes of the Firekeeper, he passes through most of the face, leaving her cavernous, exposing the myth of her wholeness. But buried within, never to be seen by pedestrian players, the eyes serve as a momentary illusion of completeness, giving her a sudden aura of sentience outside of her fixed gestures, her rote dialogue.
Imagine a long corridor slowly filling with water
Snake dreams keep me awake, holding a cup between two hands that meld into claws the second I looked away.
Imagine a number so large it ends the world
I start to move the way certain chemicals burn, leaving behind the snakeskin of some reaction, spiraling inward.
This concludes the guided meditation
To be stifled by a dream, to be captured by it, to hide inside like an egg swallowed whole, body within a body.
Please insert disc two
One hand holds the other, rubbing the palm rhythmically with intention. $3.99
At a funeral, you receive an email.
“Subject: The Ripest Orange.
I ate it.”
You close it then open it again.
“The Ripest Orange.”
You catch the priest pouring Smart Water in the holy water bowls.
“I ate it.”
Refreshing the window, you wait for a follow-up email. Nothing comes through.
You’re morose enough to respond:
“Re: The Ripest Orange
Did you.”
The water splashes on the tile. Someone coughs from the rectory. You imagine the water speaking like an Alexa, and the way your grandma would yell at it, the way she would clutch a rosary to herself. “Play Bach’s Cello Suite,” and on cue the music begins, the congregation stands, discreetly you open the phone again.
“Re:Re: The Ripest Orange
Having another one right now.”
Attachment: IMG_44823.jpg
Wikipedia’s definition of a Composite Image contains a photomontage using four separate images; a mountainous landscape and three images of the same cosplay artist dressed in “high elf attire” holding a bow and arrow at differing angles. The photos of the cosplayer show her in sharp relief, a flash was used, and her bow’s shadow partially obscures her face. She is seen at various scales, all superhuman in size. The towering cosplayer smiles at the camera. She might be thinking, “I could be anywhere, a forest, a meadow, but I am here, standing on tradeshow carpet at a hotel in Philadelphia.” The artist responsible for the photomontage might have thought, “You belong in the mountains. You are fifteen stories tall. High Elves trapped and outnumbered but we won%27t die today.”
Touching the screen, he imagined you flying to earth like a meteor.
He sent ten unanswered texts, one of them was graphic.
Then, a photo of a quickly drawn battleaxe dripping with something.
He touched the screen again and closed his eyes as you plunged through the atmosphere.
Post pictures from middle school, post pictures from space, tell everyone the real reason you logged on tonight. Find that quote about the stones crying out, delete your search history again, sigh deeply, rewatch a compilation video of Adam Scott in that 90s movie, type furiously into the notes app making liberal use of the return key.
“Thevery
stones
wouldcry out!”
Text by:Kara Güt
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Bora Akinciturk(b. 1982, Ankara, Turkey). Lives and works in London. Akinciturk holds a BFA in Graphic Design, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, 2007; Fine Art Postgraduate studies at Middlesex University, London, 2008. Selected exhibitions include (applause), Pilevneli Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey, 2019; SKEE, in collaboration with Iain Ball, narrative projects, London, UK, 2019; Egg Punk Karaoke, 427, Riga, Latvia, 2018; VIBRANT MATURITY® 7+ ADULT SHOW, in collaboration with Ville Kallio, Futura, Prague, The Czech Republic, Keep Smiling is The Art of Living, Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, USA, 2017; We’re All Dead, We Just Don’t Know It Yet, Ultrastudio, Pescara, Italy, 2017; Fallen Angels, in collaboration with Noemi Merca, Komplot, Brussels, Belgium, 2017. His band Fino Blendax, in collaboration with Ahmet Öğüt at: The ICA, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven; The 56th Venice Biennale, Creative Time Summit: The Night Art Made the Future Visible 2015.
Ben Quinn(b.1991 Dayton, OH) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design and MFA from California College of the Arts in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include Pt. 2 Gallery in Oakland, Cloaca Projects and Fused Space in San Francisco, Littman Gallery at Portland State University. Quinn’s work deals mostly with post-psychedelic reflection and sensitivities to the supernatural through painting, sometimes accompanied by image and sound.
Hyun Jung Jun(b. 1989 Seoul, South Korea ) Jun is an artist whose installations are measures and meditations which take up more time than they do space. Often existing as collections of assorted gestures in a variety of mediums, Jun’s work embellishes and elaborates on the chaotic monotony of everyday life and its frequent friction with the fantasies and daydreams that dance between the gaps of passing time. Working with commonplace commodities such as candles, bread, sewn and painted wearables, Jun’s work borrows from familiar, domestic language to describe and search the ornate identities of our individuality and culture. She received her BFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in 2019. She has participated in a number of artist residencies such as the Vermont Studio Center and Alchemy in rural Canada and has worked directly with a number of artists and galleries in Chicago over the years. She has two upcoming two-person shows at LVL3 and HG Inn this fall.
Cory Pappalardo(b. 1989 Andrews Airforce Base, Maryland ) is an intuitive anarch living and working in Olympia, Washington.
Makes magick mullein candles
has lots of books
saves seeds
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Alake Schilling(b. 1993 Los Angeles, CA) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Schilling has shown at No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH, Maitland Foley, Los Angeles, CA , Go Away Road curated by Adrienne Rubenstein, Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden, Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, New Acquisitions, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FLBody, Curtain, Advance, Loyal, StockholmFun House, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, England, ALAC Art fair, Club Pro, Los Angeles, CA, Group Exhibition, BBQLA, Los Angeles, CA, Group Exhibition, Club Pro, Los Angeles, CA, Group Exhibition, Steve Turner, Los Angeles, CA, Group Show, Unclebrother, Hancock, NY, MECA Art Fair, 356 Mission, San Juan, Puerto Rico,
Jake Kent(b. 1990) is an artist working between rural Staffordshire and Berlin. He graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a degree in Fine Art in 2014 and completed a year of study with The School of the Damned (an alternative art-education experiment initiated in response to rising tuition fees) in 2016. Since 2012 he has been involved in artist led spaces, namely Triple O.G. Gallery and Publishers (2012-14) and Losers Gym (2016-17).
His work is an amalgamation of his interests in current and historical attempts to live differently. Stemming from a teenage passion for and continued involvement in punk music, which led to an introduction to Europe’s remaining squat scene, combined with current socio-political theories he creates artworks that exist in speculative futures. These works sit on the fence between artwork and functional objects. Calendars, candle holders, rugs and puppets all exist in often post-apocalyptic, future-fictions in an attempt to embody an art/object maker whose knowledge or memory of capitalism, technique and art history is vague, manipulated or non-existent.