What happens someone who grew up on the N64 makes art? You get Cammy, Sub-Zero and GI Joe rolling up on Mario’s stomping grounds in tanks. That’s part of what you’ll see in the premise of Jonathan Monaghan’s The Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings, which is currently showing at the Curator’s Office gallery in Washington DC.
Here’s their description of the show:
Curator’s Office is delighted to present the first debut solo exhibition of Jonathan Monaghan, a young and innovative artist working at the cutting edge of animation. The exhibition includes an eight-minute computer animated film and two prints derived from the CGI film.
The artist is a self-avowed video game fanatic and was highly influenced by video games from his youth, such as Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter. Monaghan plucks and alters the characters and environments from these games to create a new narrative.
Succinctly describing the film, the artist says, “Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings depicts a lamb and a bull’s journey through my own version of Super Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. The film combines elements from iconic video games with a myriad of references, such as Wall Street, the Metropolitan Club, Bizet’s Carmen, and hair products. Taking a comparative mythology approach to certain aspects of contemporary culture, the film aims to mediate basic oppositions such as good and evil, life and death and reality and fantasy.”
If you’re planning a trip to the US capital, you’re going to be swimming in video game culture over the next few weeks. There is, of course, the giant Art of Video Games exhibit going up in The Smithsonian American Art Museum opening in March. And now comes word of this smaller, quirkier gallery show.
Sacrifice of the Mushroom King
[Curator’s Office, via The Washington Post]
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