Joe Sola

Working in VR space I was immediately struck by how the form, this virtual world, most clearly mirrored how my imagination worked. VR is part painting, part film making, part sculpture, part collage, part performance, part sound, part animation. I am able to combine all of these and other forms within this artwork, transforming spaces with a snap of the finger, with the gaze of my eyes, changing perspectives instantaneously, strangulating sounds, inserting new characters at different size and scale, leaping from environments and POVs like the suited sentinels from the Wachowski brother’s Matrix (2000), at a fraction the cost, without a team of 150 special effect persons. The only other way I know to approach this flexibility and malleability is through the written word. So in a way this VR is a new kind of writing for me, one that more closely reflects my multi-media, time based imagination, as it attempts to wrestle itself free from a system of images and structures created from cinematic languages. Where before I staged separate and distinct performances, films, paintings, digital prints, and drawings, now all are mashed together into something new. This artwork, Changing Room, looks at violence, sexuality and race through cinema and other media. ­­­­ - Joe Sola