Los Angeles-based contemporary art gallery Moran Bondaroff is showing its first exhibition in Detroit on Thursday, June 2. The opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. at the former Woods Cathedral at 1945 Webb Avenue. The exhibit is part of the gallery’s yearlong residence in the former Detroit cathedral.
War Games gathers works of art, which relate to an emergent practice, that Benjamin Godsill, the curator, conceptualizes as “technological misuse and abuse.” The art in this exhibit uses the form, structure, architecture, and aesthetics of contemporary technology in ways that are outside the norm. In other words, these works shape the feeling of innovation to absurdist but elegant ends.
The exhibit features artist Simon Denny, Yngve Holen, Haley Mellin, Yuri Pattison, Oliver Payne, Hannah Perry, Jon Rafman, Chadwick Rantanen, Sean Raspet, Yves Scherer, Hugh Scott-Douglas, and Sean Townley.
War Games takes it name from the 1983 Hollywood movie of the same name. The film starred Matthew Broderick as a high school computer wiz who hacks into the U.S. Missile Defense System and begins to play the game of “Global Thermonuclear War.” The computer he plays with is a semi-sentient one that, unfortunately, doesn’t view it as a game.
The film War Games was one of the first to normalize the digital and presenting a world where teenagers live with computers in their bedrooms. The film’s computer hacker character that Broderick personifies and his desire to understand complex systems by taking them apart is exemplified in the exhibition.
Drawing on earlier art movements, including Surrealism, Conceptualism, and Minimalism, the varied artists assembled for War Games are all trying to disassemble the world around them and reassemble it in ways that offer aesthetic, cultural, and even political solutions. As opposed to tearing down the dominant culture, these artists use the very tools of domination to reorder and rethink possibilities.
And to a degree, like Broderick’s character, they do so because they are just as interested in the results of their interventions as we are in viewing them.