Morgan Rice 2024

Abstract

Xanadu is a tabletop role-play game about social construction: the concept that societies collectively invent the terms that then come to define reality. My purpose is to suggest that there is revolutionary power in this, and to explore the ways in which play, imagination, and nonlinear storytelling can develop viable descriptions of reality outside of Western constructs. My artwork often responds to observations about social systems and epistemologies. From what I observe, the systems that dominate societies worldwide derive primarily from slavery, war, and supremacist Western ideologies, and work in tandem to power a centuries-long process of mass exploitation. In my thesis work, I wanted to distill these intertwining systems into a microcosm that names and deconstructs, but does not reproduce, the violence of these systems of oppression, while making space for creative experimentation with alternatives. Writing the game was also a way of creating a context for the artwork I would make in response to it. The exhibition is designed to show the temporality of the project’s composition, and to offer thematic breadcrumbs about the game’s narrative universe. It functions as a pathway, wall-papered with notes and early concept sketches that give way to more concrete game materials, alongside symbolic works relating to the game’s themes of performativity, social construct, authoritarianism, and community. The “destination” at the end of the pathway mimics the scene in which player-characters find themselves when the game begins.