Super Button Mashers

Planning on staying in and playing video games on your Friday night?  If you live in Chicago, why don't you combine your love of games with art and make your way over to OhNo!Doom gallery for the fantastic video game themed show, "Super Button Mashers."

I am excited to participate in this show with my Oregon Trail inspired piece "Meager Portions, Grueling Pace."  If you are not familiar with the game, it is based off of the real Oregon Trail trek across the United States and is filled with rattlesnake encounters, dysentery and broken wagon wheels.  Does that sound fun or what??  It's quite addictive and best of all, in elementary school, we got to play it off of floppy disks on our green screened Apple computers, because somehow, it is also educational.  

Growing up, my siblings and I owned a copy of the game for our home computer, but instead of strategizing on how to make it to Oregon and navigate the Dalles river, we would compete on how little miles we could travel.  This new way of playing the game also involved strategy, namely by quickly killing off the entire pioneer family by ignoring illnesses, buying the max amount of food for the wagon (and then letting it rot), setting food rations to 'meager portions' and the pace of the oxen to 'grueling.'  Doing this would ensure writing silly epitaphs for your characters with names like "Ima Goner" before even leaving Missouri.

The piece I made for OhNo!Doom is a trophy mount honoring one of the exhausted oxen from our sort of twisted way of playing the game.  It's quite large in size, about 13.5"x11"x14".  My favorite element besides his down turned head, broken horn and purple eye bags is it's giant tongue.  I wont be able to get to Chicago to see the show, but I am looking forward to seeing the pictures and how the other artists interpreted the theme!

The show runs February 11th-February 25th 2012.  Get all the details for it here!