More or less I became enamoured of Maksim Bugrimov’s dancing Monsters in v r $4.99 and then from there especially his Dead Man in the Bag (and then Stalin Statues as so on). I talked about his work at (I think) Museums Without Walls and have generally been making a case for the value/power of being aware of and thinking about the actual human creator of assets via his work. (I think I probably wrote about this in The Stuff Games Are Made Of as well.) From there is made sense at some point to put on a “solo show” of MB’s work as a way to really double down on that specific slice of what I drew from v r $4.99, so this is kind of the next logical step in a way. (There’s some AI stuff involved in this in the sense of really emphasizing human effort too.)
My hunch/hypothesis is that staging a show of a specific asset creator ought to reveal similar things to curating any solo show in terms of resonances between the works, the revelation of a personal style, the chance to admire craft and detail, and so on. And then along side that I’m also hoping/imagining that I get to play a bit with the question of how best to stage an exhibition like this, how to position things, play with scale, architectures, space, etc. I’ll inevitably draw on what I’ve seen from the work Michael Berto (and others) have done in the ZIUM series. So part of the why here is the why of play and fun with something “serious” like a museum space.
So it looks like the tl;dr why is: