AMERICAN FLAG IV -Video Game, 2021
art installation mix media

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American Flag represents a “giant photo album,” that is part of a wider project NO FASHION PLACES OF AMERICA.

The format of American Flag, with its particular interactive structure and its editable set up characterizes also the “fourth chapter” of Yuri Catania’s American snapshots. 

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The central theme of American Flag – Video Game composed of 90 images taken inside a well-known video game: a large photo album, straddling the virtual and real, which takes on the features of an American flag.

 

"American Flag IV: VIDEOGAME" is above all an interactive installation, which offers the observer the possibility of repositioning the images as he pleases, like in a game, thus allowing him to become part of the creative process of the work himself, regenerating it. each time into something new and unrepeatable.

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Yuri Catania says: "As an addicted video game player, over time, I became disinterested in the violent and criminal purpose of the game. I began to wonder, on foot or with a "borrowed" bicycle, through the virtual environments of Los Angeles. Thus, for over four years, I have started a design path as a "street photographer" within the videogame, to tell a virtual world so well created that it was able to give me the same sensations and the same impulses of the places I am familiar with and that I photograph, usually of the city of Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert. It is something that, as a photographer and lover of technology, fascinates and attracts me, but which from another side also raises questions and concerns about the implications that this now perfect overlap between real and virtual could have in our lives."

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The flag of Black Neon, that will host 90 new photographs, is itself a tribute to the meteverso of Grand Thief Auto 5 and to the video game pop culture. In left the corner of the blue wooden shiny a luna park lights set represents the 50 starts of the American flag. The composition is look like a blow up effect of the first pixeled video game from the 80'. Video Game photographs have a square shape and, as the pieces of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle, they can form different stories all derived from the vast repertoire.

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On the occasion of the first exhibition at Artrust Gallery, Yuri Catania has created a parallel installation explaining the dialogue between the real world where the artist doesn't care anymore about the essential memories and symbols of his life because all now is concentrated in the metaverse of the video game. The Tv screen is the window between the two worlds. The carpet represents the limited space, like a small jail room where takes the typical nerd-gamers' life of million young people around the world. 

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American Flag Video Game (size 180 cm x 350 cm) by Yuri Catania is an interactive installation that hosts 90 photographs (14cm x 14cm each photo). Unique piece.

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solo exhibition 2021

Artrust Gallery Melano  May 10th - End of July 2021

curated by Patrizia Cattaneo

link to the art exhibition

https://www.artrust.ch/yuri-catania/