The Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center is hosting the “Open World” exhibition, which focuses on the combination of video games and contemporary art, until Feb. 21.
The Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center is an art museum in Oklahoma City off-Broadway. They have rotating exhibitions that include local and traveling exhibitions.
“Open World” is a traveling exhibition from the Akron Art Museum, located in Ohio. Many styles of contemporary art are featured, including line art, quilt work, film and playable games.
Jeremiah Davis, the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center's director, described how the exhibition blurs the line between contemporary art and video games.
“It’s not just video games as art … but the intersection between design and production of video games and contemporary art,” Davis said.
Each piece explores deep topics through the inspiration of video games.
One artist featured in the exhibit, Nathan Vincent, deconstructs masculinity in his crocheted works. Another artist, Butt Johnson, uses detailed line art to transform classic art pieces into relatable video game references.
Artist Alan Butler focuses on how homelessness is depicted in the popular game series "Grand Theft Auto," capturing images within the game to demonstrate how popular media reflects homelessness.
JooYoung Choi, Journey Vision 5000 – Sweet Cretaceous Edition
BR, 2018. Flat screen, plywood, digital video art files, acrylic paint. 24 x 25 in. Courtesy of the artist. © JooYoung Choi. Photo by Tom DuBrock.
The art also extends to short films, with JooYoung Choi's “Journey Vision 5000,” a video inside a colorful box that depicts a fantasy children’s TV show, playing into nostalgia. “The Night Journey” by Bill Viola was an interactive piece that took viewers through a bleak world that they would transcend beyond and spoke about the essence of memories.
“We want to grow our audiences and reach out to new demographics to let people know that contemporary art is for everybody,” Davis said.
The Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center hosted a variety of events throughout the lifetime of the exhibition to celebrate the works and get families involved.
On Feb. 10, the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center hosted the “Unreal: Up Next in Gaming” panel. The panel featured James Simpson, the founder of GoldFire Studios; Jeff Price, a professor at Oklahoma City University; and Linh Terford, a professional freelance video game concept artist, all of whom work in the Oklahoma video game industry in. The panelist discussed their works and backgrounds while also showing the audience different angles of the video game industry.
Terford said that she first got into video game concept art in high school in Vietnam. During college, she didn't enjoy graphic design, so she looked for other options.
“I found Oklahoma Christian University,” Terford said at the panel. “Jeff reached out to me. He was really friendly about it, and so I thought, ‘Well maybe I can go here, Oklahoma Christian is definitely a keeper then.’”
Price has taught at several universities, including Oklahoma Christian, Sam Houston State University, Oklahoma State University and Virginia Commonwealth University. He commented on how video games have grown to be a major influence in Oklahoma.
“For me, personally, the fact that we’re here at the Oklahoma Contemporary (Arts Center) talking about video games (shows) it’s exploded in Oklahoma City,” Simpson said during the panel. “When I first came here, everyone was kind of on their own islands. … James made a group where we could all come together and meet each other (and it was) was fantastic.”
The group, the Oklahoma Game Developers meetup, was started by Simpson as a way to cultivate the game developing community in Oklahoma.
“There wasn’t really a game development community, so the idea of somehow being able to grow that and being able to make an actual impact that you couldn’t on an already established hub was something exciting for me,” Simpson said.
Installation view of Open World at Oklahoma Contemporary. Photo by Ann Sherman.
The three artists also showed off their work, ranging from Terford’s freelance projects to an exclusive new look and behind the scenes at GoldFire’s new game Arctic Awakening.
Oklahoma is a growing space in the gaming world. Oklahoma schools and universities have opened up to game development and esports over the past few years.
Oklahoma Christian University hosts an extensive gaming and animation degree that lets students learn how to animate with motion capture.
Oklahoma high schools have embraced esports as a new extracurricular activity, with the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association recently adopting esports as a new branch alongside other high school esports leagues. The University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University have rapidly growing esports organizations that are now officially university-sanctioned.
The Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center contributes to this growing sphere by allowing those who might not be into video games to see the value in them. Similarly, it also allows those in the video game sphere to see the value of modern and contemporary art.
“I hope that people come and engage with something, have some time to relax, really absorb what they are seeing, and then leave with some new perspectives,” Davis said. “At the Contemporary Art Center, our goal is to always shine a light on new ideas or existing ideas being cast in a new way.”
There’s still time to visit “Open World.” The exhibition closes Feb. 21, and general entry is free.
Editor's Note: This article was modified on Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 7:15 p.m. The author was changed to Cooper Marshall due to an error at publishing time. This article was modified Wednesday, Feb. 16 at 2:00 p.m. to reflect that Nathan Vincent does crocheted work, not corduroy work.
