Sandbox Landscapes
“What 'landscape' means has been irrevocably altered by the conception of the metaverse's digital doubling- or, rather, multiplying - of it; Denny, in painting this digital space as overviewed and "owned" but also anear-abstraction, has effectively invented a new modality of landscape art.”
–Matin Herbert
For his fifth exhibition with the gallery, Simon Denny presents paintings of land plots in The Sandbox, a leading crypto backed metaverse for game worlds. Users and companies buy and sell land in this virtual world, each developing a part in a new world of games. The Sandbox land plots are tradable as NFTs, which are represented by gridded squares that depict a fragment of the total Sandbox world map. When users buy a plot of land, they can enter an image into their section of the map, creating a user-generated geography of images – many brands, profile pictures, and memes. The map becomes a fractured image of a global crypto-gaming populous, with each plot a fragment of that world.
Denny has produced landscape paintings of a few plots of this Sandbox land, depicting their gridded map-fragment-tokens using a layering of digital print and oil paint, which merge into a surface of confluent and dissonant moments where the analogue meets the digital. Using one of the oldest and most instrumentalizable formats for art – the landscape painting – a continuity is found across technologies and worlds, bringing this new site into the room. Each painting has QR codes printed on its side, linking to the original digital land asset it depicts, and to a new specially coded token which comes with each painting, tracking forever who owns the land that the painting depicts. These dynamic NFTs, included in a crypto wallet strapped to the back of each painting’s stretcher bar, link the crypto world to that of the gallery, the collector to the landowner.
The new landscape paintings distil the feeling of witnessing new worlds as emerge – timestamps in a provenance of getting to know the virtual as it becomes more and more dominant. They marry several asset forms – a painting, a crypto token, a land plot – to one artwork, a portal between worlds. They echo gridded modernist blocks as much as they do it’s pictorial language of abstraction, while also recalling waves of Pop and appropriation art through their process and subject matter. As leading Stanford communications professor Fred Turner has written about the series, the paintings “are portraits of systems that we usually know only by their effects, systems that shape how we know ourselves and the natural world, systems that define the time in which we live.”
–Matin Herbert
For his fifth exhibition with the gallery, Simon Denny presents paintings of land plots in The Sandbox, a leading crypto backed metaverse for game worlds. Users and companies buy and sell land in this virtual world, each developing a part in a new world of games. The Sandbox land plots are tradable as NFTs, which are represented by gridded squares that depict a fragment of the total Sandbox world map. When users buy a plot of land, they can enter an image into their section of the map, creating a user-generated geography of images – many brands, profile pictures, and memes. The map becomes a fractured image of a global crypto-gaming populous, with each plot a fragment of that world.
Denny has produced landscape paintings of a few plots of this Sandbox land, depicting their gridded map-fragment-tokens using a layering of digital print and oil paint, which merge into a surface of confluent and dissonant moments where the analogue meets the digital. Using one of the oldest and most instrumentalizable formats for art – the landscape painting – a continuity is found across technologies and worlds, bringing this new site into the room. Each painting has QR codes printed on its side, linking to the original digital land asset it depicts, and to a new specially coded token which comes with each painting, tracking forever who owns the land that the painting depicts. These dynamic NFTs, included in a crypto wallet strapped to the back of each painting’s stretcher bar, link the crypto world to that of the gallery, the collector to the landowner.
The new landscape paintings distil the feeling of witnessing new worlds as emerge – timestamps in a provenance of getting to know the virtual as it becomes more and more dominant. They marry several asset forms – a painting, a crypto token, a land plot – to one artwork, a portal between worlds. They echo gridded modernist blocks as much as they do it’s pictorial language of abstraction, while also recalling waves of Pop and appropriation art through their process and subject matter. As leading Stanford communications professor Fred Turner has written about the series, the paintings “are portraits of systems that we usually know only by their effects, systems that shape how we know ourselves and the natural world, systems that define the time in which we live.”
