A collaboration of work

A show of small paintings in a time of political chaos

A show of light in black and white. Drawings by Heather McGeachy and Photos by Zach Mazur.

excerpt follows: "While plenty of folks rip the Ann Arbor Art Fairs for "art on a stick" and others use it as a staging ground for the debate on funnel cakes vs. elephant ears, I toured some tents Wednesday with the hope of finding an artist who appeals to video gaming sensibilities.

Very few fairgoers seemed to venture past Forest Avenue on South University, but as Ann Arbor News columnist Judy McGovern points out today, the ones who did were in for a treat at tent full of "emerging'' artists.

And at the very end of the tent, at the edge of the Art Fairs, is one serious gamer.

The first thing you'll see as you approach Heather Losey McGeachy's display is a sniper with his cross hairs trained on you. If it looks like something out of a video game, you and Heather are on the same page.

She has a series of paintings called Digital Real, each one based on a scene from Call of Duty. Many of the paintings even feature the gun barrel and HUD icons to make first-person shooter fans feel right at home.

Prefer role-playing games? Heather has another series entitled My Life as Sareth, in which she did a painting every day based on her experiences playing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. For 94 days."....

excerpt follows: "On the surface Heather uses traditional materials to depicted seemingly traditional subject matter but her work is actually heavily influence by the sense of adventure found in the virtual realm of video games. Heather states, “ I explored many different aspects of virtual living through painting, digital painting, lighted boxes, transparent color gels and programming interactions, but after a constant cycle of trimming out what I wanted to express I realized that it all came down to the affect that light has on us. It doesn’t matter if it’s light from an led screen, the sun, or virtual light.”"

exerpt follows: "Losey, who lives in Lansing, likes video games, but takes that interest a step further....
So when you walk into the gallery, don't be surprised to spy a few scenes from "Call of Duty".
"I always like playing video games and being able to experience things you can't in the real world" she said. You're experiencing a version of that war (World War II) and you can fight the whole thing"
Her paintings and the altered scanned images reflect the dichotomy Losey sees in the information age. "I like the manipulation of reality. Society is let to believe something is a certain way when it's not always true." she said. "Chaoes" a scene of a soldier near a tank takes on a different look after Losey alters it. The soldier moves and it resembles a different scene. ....

excerpt follows: " Losey, a former Waverly High School and LCC student and recent graduate from Kendall College of Art & Design, exhibits perhaps the most standout work in the walk. Alternating light boxes and high-tech graphics with old-fashioned oil paintings, the collection combines the sensibilities of slick graphic design, the thrill of explosive video games and the horror or war into a stunning vision of cartoon color and chaos. "Threat", a single oil painting isolated from the groupings of guns and explosions, portrays the silent victims of war: three women in burkas.

While Losey's inspiration originally came from war-based video games, current events have taken their toll on her while creating this body of work. "You can not help but make that connection with the real world, " she said. "I need to take a step back and let that go for a bit" Losey's next work will focus on digital technology as it affects everyday life in modern society.

"Heather McGeachy took a rather novel approach to her pieces with the use of digital painting. This intriguing media appears to consist of a digitally composed image printed on clear plastic sheets and encased in plexiglas. The more abstract pieces that combine an exploration of composition and color are the most successful. The piece Tyria (2008) reveals an abstract Southwestern landscape with incredible depth even though the image floats, suspended away from the wall. It has a water color quality, since the colors are transparent. It invites the viewer to make sense of the organic shapes and absence of solid lines. In contrast, the piece Dunkoh (2008) is a triptych depicting cartoon-like science fiction scenes. The first and third images are of the same robot with differing colors, and the center image is of a futuristic building. This composition makes the three images seem disconnected, and the work would appear more coherent if the center image was, for instance, the robot again with still different colors. This piece would find a better place at a sci-fi convention than an art gallery. However, the variety of McGeachy’s pieces provides a rounded portfolio of work that demonstrates exploration of the medium of digital painting, such as overlapping colors and layers of sheets with color and black lines."