Leo Castañeda

I produce works ranging from paintings to experimental video games that evoke spaces and forms between abstraction and science fiction. Pieces appear both alien and familiar and filtered through subdued palettes that place viewers in unknown timelines. Minimalist machines meet scenes of ambiguous origins across feedback loops of analog to digital translating drawings and paintings into interactive virtual worlds through video game design software. The cycle continues as images of virtual spaces and digital process renders become a reference for paintings and sculptures. Installations include handmade works and digital experiences simultaneously, giving sculptures function as machines through which viewers enter the virtual worlds. Works are organized under the linguistic structures in video games, where words such as “Levels”, “Bosses”, and “Items”, recall hierarchies of power, mythologies, corporations and more. Through these labels, I aim to bridge qualities of the gaming and art industries such as gaming's interactivity and malleability of the self, with the tangibility and layered significance of art. Also, gaming's innately global platform of inexpensive and endless reproduction in contrast to fine art's relationship to scarcity and high commercial values. Unconscious origins of the work come from familial exposure to Latin American modernism in art and architecture as well as the sublime of nature growing up in Colombia. Conscious drivers, meanwhile, analyze the global platforms of videogames, animation and Hollywood films. “Concept art” that plans and storyboards games and movies focused my early artistic aspirations and function as an integral part of my artwork's conception and intent, now becoming a video game itself. For the residency I will show progress images of my upcoming videogame "Levels and Bosses", as well as other experiments in virtual environments that engage painting, drawing and virtual constructions interchangeably.