Zabludowicz Collection, London
12 January – 26 February 2023

Molly Erin McCarthy grew up in Cornwall and, after a few years in London, moved to Plymouth in nearby Devon. Her work invokes the natural landscape, folklore and history of her home county. For this show, a small gallery has been transformed into an interactive game space, a makeshift military bunker where small sculptural works give the sense of being part of a shrine and make “real” parts of the virtual world that plays out on a screen.

Visitors are encouraged to sit here amid sandbags and military khaki parachute material and play the interactive video game, exploring McCarthy’s digital landscape and navigating a virtual world. The space becomes a place to reflect on the often-dystopian world in which we live and an immersive apocalyptic outpost where we can escape from it. A subtle narrative reveals itself through the game, which the artist has determined, allowing for an interesting interaction between artist and players, the latter swaying between individual choices and McCarthy’s pre-created vision and story.

In an interview with the show’s curator, Julia Greenway, McCarthy explains that she drew her influences from open-world role-playing games such as Death Stranding and The Elder Scrolls, which involve quests and exploration of digital environments; in her own game, she has created riddles and codes that piece by piece reveal a narrative and world. She says: “I was really influenced in my adolescence when home game consoles and PCs were just becoming commonplace. I was spending half my time in the beautiful landscapes of Cornwall and then half my time in digital worlds. That was all new for me: cohesive world-building games that had all these different styles and levels of engagement and interaction. The transition between a regional landscape and a digital one is very much the foundation of my practice.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.