The Game Game (*a.k.a. The Sugary Factual Effervescent Prolific Warm Clear Dank Resilient Titillating Upside-Down Game)
Originally envisioned as one of a series of sculpturally-based board games, the Game Game was adapted to an online forum as COVID outbreaks led to the cancellation of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center Residency where I was slated to develop and construct it in March. Sculpture has always served me as a type of solitary play, where improvisation and imagination have found form in material. Game boards presented the possibility of merging two things I hold dear, my assemblage practice - a sustained devotion to worn and weary objects - with the shared experience of collaborative play.
The Game Game is not a typical game. It has no finite rules, singular winner or rule maker, measurable achievements, tangible rewards, strategic motivations, serious rivalry, consistent visual system or predetermined end that most of us associate with gameplay. Instead, it relies on the collective imagination and raw creations of its player-collaborators to provide the answers and meaning within an environment that esteems the absurd, the impractical, the improvised and the unrealized.