Metaverses are emerging 3-D-enabled digital space that uses virtual reality, augmented reality, and other advanced internet and semiconductor technologies to allow people to have lifelike personal and business experiences online. The term “the metaverse”, often referred to as a single thing, means different things to different people. Some believe it’s a digital playground for friends. Others think it has the potential to be a commercial space for companies and customers. One of the characteristics of the metaverse is the user’s role as a potential stakeholder through things like property ownership: the buying and selling of parcels of virtual real estate in what might be thought of as a new frontier for exploration, exploitation, and/or speculation.
These new paintings by Simon Denny speak to colonial landscape painting: a genre which, from the 15th — 19th centuries and beyond, used the artistic languages of largely European picture-making that were familiar to its intended audience to represent unfamiliar territories and enhance claims to ownership of the places depicted. Adopting the strategy rather than the style, Denny has reinvented and shifted the genre for our time and conditions with an artistic language that feels familiar to us, using styles, formats and techniques of modern and contemporary painting to represent unfamiliar new territories of the metaverse and enhance claims to it.
The paintings in this exhibition are abstracted representations of specific parcels of property in the Loot Realms metaverse. Parcels of this metaverse are officially represented by a Tolkien-esque map-like graphic. We can be viewers of the painting, but it is also possible for us to see the actual place as well as to access information about the ownership and transactional history of the places the paintings depict. Denny provides QR codes on the edge of each canvas as the corresponding means to do so.
The four paintings in this exhibition at the gallery in Sydney are the most recent developments in this format of Simon Denny’s work, which debuted earlier this year with his solo exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover, Germany, and have since been the focus of solo exhibitions at Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium and at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, United States. A new publication that comprehensively catalogues Simon Denny’s Metaverse Landscape paintings is to be published in early 2024.
