Filip Kostic
Landgrab the Musical in Virtual Reality
SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA
The Stalls at Skylight ROW DTLA
1925 East 8th Street, Los Angeles
VIP Preview | Friday, February 15, 2 - 5PM
VIP Opening Night | Friday, February 15, 5 - 9PM
Regular Show Days | Saturday - Sunday, February 16 - 17, 12 - 8PM
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to participate in the first annual Spring/Break Art Show LA, with a solo presentation by Filip Kostic. On view will be Landgrab the Musical in Virtual Reality, a four-song narrative VR experience housed within a monumental sculpture.
Virtual reality as a cultural artifact resembles the trajectory of any image-based technology which fundamentally restructures the position of the viewer within the image. In Landgrabthe Musical in VR, it is this repositioning that Kostic investigates. The viewer (as represented by a floating cowboy hat) follows a cowboy avatar as he sings of his binary existence. Four digital western landscapes are adjoined and mapped one-to-one with the steel and wooden structure that houses the experience - as to address the paradox of site specificity in virtual reality. The conflation of digital and physical space in real-time, as defined by their contingent existence, actualizes the physicality of simulation. We are confronted with an old model of masculinity in the image of cowboy seen through the literal lens of a new technology, as a means to examine themes of identity and agency in simulated spaces. The four-song narrative oscillates between singing of the construct of the simulation and addressing the emotional collateral of being a digital image.
Filip Kostic is an artist and educator originally from Serbia, now living in Los Angeles. Filip teaches at ArtCenter College of Design in the Interaction Design Department. Kostic is interested in the proposition that screen/virtual space and physical space have collapsed onto one another, that they are in a tautological loop affirming one another. His work uses simulation, installation, and video to investigate themes of autonomy, the digital self, and the mechanisms that facilitate these understandings. Recent exhibitions include: Pilot, group show with Andy Bennet and Colleen Hargaden, Elephant Art Space, Los Angeles; Fälschung, Projektwohnung Krudebude, Leipzig, Germany; Twister, collaboration with Theo Triantyfillidis, Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles; Open Loop, Roger's Office, Los Angeles; and Spring/Break Art Show 2017, New York City.