"The Surreal Real" Exhibition at Akron Soul Train

Goss began his residency in March, intending to expand on his engineered, interactive installation pieces with surreal video-based environments.  His pieces encouraged viewers to climb, lay or crawl inside his installations to view video projections.  Soon after his residency began, the pandemic required us all to “shut-down”, and everyone experienced a restructuring of reality.  Goss’ work addresses our new, altered social landscape where we no longer are able to sit close to a friend, share a meal with them or see each other’s full face.  His new work explores this new social interaction based on social distancing and mask wearing.

Gaewsky’s work is largely influenced by retro video games and examines the notion of nostalgia and the fragility of memory.  His bright, surreal landscape paintings are composed of layered stills taken from Nintendo and Super Nintendo games, then altered and manipulated.  He states, “While these new hybrid landscapes become settings for my own developing narratives, some visual elements may appear familiar or the original game source recognizable. However, the constructed landscapes never actually existed in the older video games, perhaps causing a faulty memory or a quasi-nostalgic experience for those who might have enjoyed playing these games from that era.” Gaewsky residency work depicts imaginary worlds, half are representative of sites situated in the dungeon realms, while the other half are located throughout the paradise realm.