Hannah Epstein and Kevin Brophy
Hot girls only
Published July 6, 2021
Hannah Epstein and Kevin Brophy, 🔥 Hot 🔥 Girls 🔥 Only, 2020, Art Game
Newest Art Game: 🔥 Hot 🔥 Girls 🔥 Only is an Art and a Game that was formed as a response to criticism of art games from a writer of a preeminent publication on contemporary digital art. This criticism functioned to solidified boundaries between designer and artist, cementing hierarchies and reifying exclusionary space for gaming and fine art. With a heavy dose of satire, the gameplay is filled with exaggerated formal and cultural superlatives of the gaming world and the art world, as well as the social configuration proscribed onto the player upon entry.
Once in the main game space, the design aesthetic follows art world tropes to an absurdist degree. The space, a white cube itself, is overrun with white cube-based art and galleries. There are six interactive galleries within a gallery, offering the player elusive, exclusive, elitist art games within an art game. Here, the hot player attempts to hear, view, interact with, and access the information of the galleries despite our *new* kind of Space Invaders: invasive white cubes wearing suits attacking and blocking the player with a barrage of pick-up lines.
Hannah Epstein’s and Kevin Brophy’s collaborative work is informed by digital performance. As praxis, we discuss ‘accepted’ forms of cultural production, questioning hierarchies, trends, and texts. In process and performance, we overproduce the stereotype as a means of subversion within the system we are situated.
Hannah Epstein (b.1985) is an artist working in textile and digital media. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2017) and a B.A in Folklore & Religious Studies from Memorial University (2009). Inspired by television and popular culture, Epstein takes from the traditional east coast craft of rug hooking and modified it for contemporary contexts. She often uses video game technology and imagery to develop a world of characters that playfully reflects our own. She is represented by Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles.
Kevin Brophy is a US-based visual artist, writer, and educator interested in dialogical power structures—rhetorical, visual, and social—with a focus on everyday language and non-dominant narratives. Broadly, her artistic practice includes poetry, new media, installation, and speculative design facilitated and informed by social technologies. She holds a BA from the University of South Florida and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University as a Regina and Marlin Miller fellow. She has participated in residencies and exhibitions internationally, in both established and alternative spaces, both online and off. Most recently, she has been awarded an NEA Southern Constellation Fellowship, Media Arts Fellow at the Kala Art Institute, and held Artist-in-Residence positions at the University of Kansas and Penn State University.