Brendan Lee Satish Tang and Sonny Assu: Ready Player 2
to
Illingworth Kerr Gallery 1407 14 Ave NW, Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary, Alberta T2N 4R3
Sonny Assu and Brendan Tang, "Ready Player Two (detail)," 2016
digital graphic, dimensions variable.
In "Ready Player 2," Brendan Lee Satish Tang and Sonny Assu combine elements from science fiction, comic book, and gaming cultures to consider how these forms alternately reinforce and transcend racial boundaries in youth culture. In their individual practices, Tang and Assu frequently negotiate the material and conceptual dynamics of culture and ethnicity. Informed by their mixed-race backgrounds and experiences of Canadian life in the 1980s and 1990s, for this exhibition the artists bring together found objects, selections from previous bodies of work, and new collaborative pieces to create immersive spaces that evoke the adolescent sanctuaries of their time: the basement, the arcade, and the comic book store.