Off the Board Game, Onto the Digital Canvas
The capricious churn of internet-charged culture is producing more main characters, apocrypha and relics than we can handle. Remember when the Canadian musician known as Grimes — former partner of one of the world’s most powerful men, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk — brought a sword to the 2021 Met Gala? The image of a futurist pop star lugging a medieval blade (made from a smelted AR-15, no less) down the red carpet summed up the mystifying way contemporary culture seems to run in all directions, chasing myths both new and old.
Simon Denny, an artist working in Berlin, creates sculptures, installations, videos and prints inspired by the aesthetics of tech companies. In two concurrent shows in Manhattan he has seized on omens like the blade to explore the sociopolitical fallout of the technology industry’s taste for medieval lore. In Denny’s telling, dreams of wizards and blacksmiths, dark forests and dank castles shape the newest digital realms.
“Dungeon,” Denny’s fifth show with Petzel Gallery in New York, features a kind of heaving shrine to Grimes: Puffs from an automatic steamer inflate a black “Game of Thrones” T-shirt once owned by the star, installed in a Plexiglas case like a suit of armor. The sculpture is plugged into a power strip that Denny sourced from a liquidation sale at Twitter during its Musk-mandated transition to X.
Downtown, “Read Write Own,” Denny’s first show with Dunkunsthalle, an artist-run space in the financial district, offers recent paintings from his “Metaverse Landscape” series alongside sculptures made using whiteboards auctioned off by Twitter after Musk took the reins. The work suggests that internet culture, and by extension our heavily networked society, resembles the fantasy landscapes evoked by Dungeons & Dragons, or “The Lord of the Rings.” Tech-augmented life, in other words, can be understood as a massive role-playing game, in which physical and virtual realms merge, and Musk et al. make the rules. (Denny also curated a current group show at Petzel featuring like-minded artists exploring fantasy genres with new media such as 3-D printing.)
“Dungeon” features a new series of paintings of top-down views of various role-playing game maps — really digital prints on canvas, smeared with oil pigment, for a photorealistic yet decaying effect. In a rendering of a HeroQuest board, gray, blue and green bricks simmer in the blocky darkness like a geometric abstraction. Other paintings deepen the idea of “dungeon”: One smeary figure eight is the board for a Hannah Montana-branded version of the tabletop game Mall Madness. A beguiling iridescent pattern on another painting could be ranks of columns or shelves, but the company name Nvidia in the corner tells you it’s actually a graphics card of the sort often adapted for handling cryptocurrency transactions.
