Friday, May 2, 2014

Fresh Take: Genesis 2014


"Genesis 2014" by Dan Hernandez
Renaissance & Byzantine paintings with vintage video game elements.

These paintings will be part of Hernadez's second solo exhibit, "Genesis 2014," at the Kim Foster Gallery in New York, March 27 - May 31, 2014.  The work included in the exhibit includes a series of paintings that either depict vintage video games as classic paintings or insert classic video game elements into vintage paintings, depending on how you look at it.  The series is an exploration of iconography and devotion.  The title is an allusion both to the first book of the Bible, but also to the Sego Genesis.
"Genesis is defined as “the coming into being of something; the origin”, but like many words that can be used as both noun and proper noun, what it communicates depends largely on its usage. Two of its usages, and the relationship that exists between them, are particularly interesting and relevant to my body of work. In the first, and probably most well known, Genesis is the title of an important religious text. In the second, and equally well known amongst my generation, Genesis is the Sega video game console that hit the home gaming market in the late 1980s.

While these two usages come from very different traditions, they share some common ground. On a basic level both signify a type of narrative device. In the case of the religious text, the Book of Genesis houses the creation stories that are part of the Christian tradition; Noah’s Arc, Adam & Eve, etc. Similarly, the Sega Genesis game console is a vehicle for narrative games like Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Altered Beast and others. On another level, both of the narrative collections that are associated with these usages of Genesis utilize the supernatural and mythic as a central and reoccurring theme. These comparisons are clearly a bit of a stretch, but within the space that is created by embracing such eccentric relationships there exists unique and interesting possibilities for artistic exploration."


  








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