Waynesboro War Games (2023)
3D printed PLA, citadel paints, game mat, engraved plexi glass, steel
Waynesboro War Games reimagines the artist’s hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, and the surrounding countryside as a site for tabletop strategy gaming and fantasy.
The pastoral tranquility of the landscape is ruptured by fantastical figures and nostalgic gamespaces from the artist’s childhood.This fractured game board draws on the sleepy Virginia college town’s role in the history of the colonial United States, the Antebellum South, early internet folklore,and more recently the Unite the Right rally of 2017.
In this space, internet cult figure Chris Chan walks along the same downtown avenues that become the site of a neo nazi rally. Confederate monuments, Jeffersonian architecture, and old plantation houses intermingle with mundane suburbia, strip malls, and haunted, abandoned motels lying at the feet of the Blue Ridge mountains.
Below: install photos taken at Alas... the 2023 Glasgow School of Art MFA degree show at Florence Street School
photos by Chih-Kang Hsu and Matt Barnes
Below: The 3D rendering used to create the wargaming playmat. Created primarily from the topographical data of the stretch of country between Charlottesville, Waynesboro, and the Shennandoah National Park. The landscape is ruptured by a series of digitally sculpted bas reliefs generated by drawings and video game screenshots. Each game is related to concepts of landscape and the simulation of life. Minecraft, Simlife, Caesar, and Warcraft 3- in each of these sandbox like games, the player is master of their own autonomous simulated world