Art New Orleans, Visionary Art, Outsider Art, Barrister's Art Gallery
Art New Orleans, Barrister's Gallery, Outsider art, Visionary art

2331 St. Claude Ave and Spain, New Orleans, LA 70113  •  504-525-2767 (6246)   •   Tues-Sat 11am-5pm  • 
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David Sullivan ~  "You Win"    
Click on any image to see enlargement
Read review in  ART FORUM .
Game Over

"Game Over"

inkjet print on die cut aluminum
(2008) 61” x 48”
High Score

"High Score"
inkjet print on die cut aluminum
2008, 35” x 27”

Invaders



"Invaders"
(Invasores del espacio)
inkjet print on die cut aluminum,
(2008)   30” x 20”
You Win

"You Win"
Custom Software and mixed media, (2008)
Power Up

"Power Up"
inkjet print on die cut aluminum,
(2008)   63” x 47”
Boom

"Boom"
Animation, 2:47 mins  (2007)

Artist's Statement

Icons from classic arcade games such as Pac-Man and Mario are utilized in a critique  of consumer culture in David’s vibrant prints on die-cut aluminum.

David’s custom video game, You Win!
delivers on the promise the title makes. It apes the look and feel of an arcade game while reducing the game to the ego-driven values at its core. Also included in the show are two animations,
Market Drop and Boom, that explode the results of our nation’s cultural and political exports. On opening night, David will present an interactive projection controlled by sound. Come
make your voice be heard. You may already be a winner!

David Sullivan is a digital artist based in New Orleans.  His animation Boom, presented in this show, is also touring the USA in Independent Exposure 2007, a film festival curated by film director Hal Hartley. Recently his piece Re Spore NOLA, a camera driven virtual mold piece, was shown as part of DesCours, a show of interactive installations in the streets and alleys of New Orleans.

Read review in  ART FORUM .

Supermega

"Supermega"
inkjet print on die cut aluminum,
(2008) 56” x 48”




slide show photos by Jonathan Traviesa

That '70s Art
bestofneworleans.com

By  D. Eric Bookhardt

And now for a positive, uplifting message from St. Claude Avenue. There, at Barrister's Gallery, an exhibition of new work by digital-media artist David Sullivan offers a helping hand to everyone who wants or needs instant gratification, a group that by now includes almost everyone. Taking his cues from pop culture, Sullivan has created a new kind of video game featuring a screen that lights up with the words "YOU WIN!!!" almost immediately after the game begins, taking instant gratification to a whole new level. Who could ask for more? Methinks, perhaps, he jests, but so much popular culture resembles self-parody anyway that the line between the real and the ridiculous was never all that clear to start with. A glance at his colorful digital prints on die-cut aluminum panels reveals that icons from Pac-Man and Mario along with "violence, and everything else that money can buy" are, as he puts it, "utilized in a critique of consumer culture." That is the critical-theory riff typical of most college new-media graduates of even remotely recent vintage, but Sullivan does it with a certain flair.

Super Mega Rampage is a complex constellation of polymorphous pop forms such as bubbles, spirals and explosive penumbras of color that conspire with overlays of automotive schematics and a variety of ghostly squiggles. It's all kind of nostalgic in a creepy sort of way, like those old, faded signs and commercial facades on Airline or Jefferson Highway, surfaces with palimpsests of earlier graphics peeling and fading into each other amid layers of more recent graffiti. It also reminds me of what happens if you've been driving for 16 hours, subsisting on junk food and coffee, and then try to go to sleep in a strange motel — this is what you see when you close your eyes. Horrible but compelling, this is what highways would dream if they dreamt.

More subtle and mysterious, Power Up is another 4-by-5-foot nimbus of vaporous clouds, continents and digital artifacts like disembodied smart-bomb guidance graphics cast adrift in cyberspace, a soporific if unsettling vision that somehow reminds me of Vice President Dick Cheney. That sense of high-tech horror lurking in the collective unconscious takes an aggressive turn in videos with titles like BoomFriendly Fire. The interesting thing about Sullivan's latest pieces, besides their unusually taut graphics, is how they actually do seem to suggest ghost broadcasts beamed from long-lost communications satellites all blending into each other in a kind of autonomous electronic unconscious from beyond the ozone layer. Nicely done.