CuteXdoom @ Maxalot gallery
Maxalot is pleased to announce the exhibition of CuteXdoom II, a fantastical new work by media artists Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier. CuteXdoom II is the second installment in Fontaine’s ongoing body of work that virtuosically transmorphs commercial technologies to surprising new ends.
CuteXdoom II manipulates the platform of Unreal Tournament, a traditionally violent videogame, to address the themes of obsession and fanatical adherence to ideologies, with particular reference to Japanese otaku culture.
The work is designed as an immersive installation and interactive gaming environment, incorporating a broad array of media and materials. The exhibition will include customized “ideology” wallpaper, a modified joypad, and stereo sound. A series of prints, both original and editions, based on the conceptual framework of CuteXdoom II will be displayed. Fontaine and Pelletier have also fabricated sculptures modeled after the collectables featured within the game. The resultant experience is a heightened sensory overload, bridging virtual and real worlds, and referencing today’s current information explosion and media saturation.
Fontaine masterfully inserts a clever new narrative within the game itself. In the first level of CuteXdoom, the protagonist’s mission is to join the “supermodern relgious cult” of CuteXDoom --whose main tenet details that the worship of cute material objects leads to happiness and enlightenment. This objective is analogous to the real-world materialism of kawaii worshippers who engage in endless consumption of seemingly harmless “cute” products for an illusive sense of satisfaction.
Once granted access to the cult; thus completing level one, the character then finds themselves awoken from a paroxysm to a now hauntingly surreal landscape: the once hyper-cute characters have been altered to appear malevolent, predatory. The protagonist has essentially been “poisoned” by the cult, and the objective undergoes a paradigm shift to escape the cult. The character must then mediate a psychedelic hyperspectra of disorientating hallucinogenic optical effects. Fontaine draws the parallels between the “poison” of vapid materialism allowed to run rampant, and literally peels back the façade of “cuteness” to reveal a problematized cultural landscape.
Firmly rooted in the impossibly infinite potentiality of new expression, Fontaine weaves a beautifully fabricated narrative that playfully inspires us to look beyond our immediate façade to question our current consumer-driven cultural landscape and escape to new, wondrous worlds.
CuteXdoom II originally debuted at the prestigious Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland, Australia in 2008. The acclaimed CuteXdoom series has been exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals internationally.
