For each themed Playkit, there will be an edition of 6 with 2 Artist Proofs produced. Selected artists will be expected to supply 8 copies of their work for the edition. The Playkits will be submitted to national and international juried shows and each artist will be given credit for their work and featured on the theresadevine.com website. All artists (any age. location, etc.) that work with PLAY as a main component of their work are eligible (e.g. Toys, Board Games, Video Games, Performances, Instructional Art and anything else you can create that incorporates PLAY). Artists are invited to push the limits. The first is a piece titled, "It's Still A Boys Club." Accepted Artwork Austin Brady Website: https://www.austin-brady.com Instagram: Motor City Wolves Artist Statement: Through my work, the garage becomes a liminal space where working-class masculinities are performed. It becomes a stage for experimentation, testing, execution, and failure. Shifting between domestic and public, it allows us to mod ourselves behind particle board walls and 2x4 studs, or open up the carport doors and spill out onto the driveway like a 10 point buck. I work to re-map white american masculinity through anxieties and fantasies within its cultural, material, and corporeal manifestations. Through the oscillating process of indulgence and criticism, I play masculine identity, to negotiate its territories, to masochistically prod its tenderness. Through the framework of feminist theory, new materialism, and queer theory, I attempt to resist toxic masculinities while galvanizing critical introspection and humorous dysmorphia. Pitching my theoretical garage in the landscape of Sword and Sorcery images and aggressive music, tabletop gaming and professional wrestling, woodshop and horror cinema, hunting, sports, and videogames, I am able to take stock of all this shit our dads left us, to loom into the hinterlands to kill what patriarchal monsters await. About this work: I have been working with the form of a D20 for a while–– Its ability within a tabletop rpg to determine actions and consequences is, at once, an effective tool for collaborative story telling, and simultaneously a tool to determine failure of otherwise idilic identities. Players create characters that are meant to set forth into a world to slay crusty necromancers and menacing dragons, then are at the mercy of potential failure dictated by the dice. this is something that I feel leaks out of fantasy and reflects a lot of aspects of identity performance. Be it gender, race, sexuality, we slip wildly between the idilic and the failure in the continuous act of 'becoming'. Where this performance/failure becomes its most dangerous is in these real-world consequences, particularly within the realm of masculine performance; where failure is met with unending toxicity, leading to the most monstrous displays of manhood. The heavy, oversized, concrete D20 is an object of play, one that illustrates the "dice checks" of everyday identity making, one that uses its the sheer weight as a reminder of the consequences of failure, and hopefully embrace that failure in play rather than violence. Biography Austin Brady was born in the cold midwestern town of Gaylord, Michigan and lived the majority of his life in the Detroit area. He received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan with a concentration in painting, and received his MFA in Painting from the University of Notre Dame with a minor in Gender Studies. He is also an alum of the Redbull House of Art residency, and has exhibited at Simone Desousa Gallery, the Snite Museum of art, the Swope Art Museum, South Bend Museum of Art, and KO gallery. He currently resides in South Bend, Indiana with his loving partner Lyndsay, and his dumb cat Renaissance. He enjoys cheeseburgers, Dungeons & Dragons, and music most would consider aggressive and unlistenable Brianna Shuttleworth Twitter: Bri-Cade Game Master Instagram: thebricade Twitch: thebricade Patreon: The Bricade Bio and Artist Statement - To Be Posted Soon. Jonathan Frey Website: https://cargocollective.com/JonathanClydeFrey Artist Statement Note: a smaller version was made for the Playkit. "Trump Mad LIbs: Bad Boyz on the Bus" These pieces use language, primarily lifted from President Trump’s Twitter account, to evaluate political rhetoric and reveal our attitudes around it. I also wanted to give viewers some agency over the language by allowing them to reshape the text’s meaning through the game. How to Play — A “reader” asks a “writer” to blindly select a word for each blank. The “reader” then reads the completed Mad Lib, revealing a story that is fantastic, funny, shocking, silly, crazy, or just plain dumb. Biography Jonathan Clyde Frey is an artist and designer who currently resides in central PA. His work broadly explores the influence of ideology on contemporary culture. Jonathan has earned degrees in art & design from the University of Dayton, the University of Florida, and the Pratt Institute. Since graduation he has taught at a variety of schools including Hope College, the University of Florida, East Tennessee State University. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. Amanda Dittami and Blair Kuhlman Amanda's Website: https://expgamedesign.com/a-fitting Amanda's Twitter: Amanda Dittami Blair's Profile: Blair Kuhlman Artist Statement: Gone From an Age: A Fitting is a motion-based farce masquerading as a digital art installation that prompts the player to twist, contort and bend his/her body in order to progress. The piece explores body image, representation of women in media and the similarities between: player to game, puppet to puppet-master. Biographies Amanda Dittami is an Educational Game Designer at Twin Cities PBS who puts an emphasis on simple fun and clear communication. Outside of PBS, Amanda also teaches game courses online as an adjunct professor for Columbia College Chicago. As a game developer and educator she utilizes games as a platform for social advocacy and analyzing experimental theories. Her work has toured museums across the nation, including The Field Museum, The Leonardo, The Phoenix Art Museum and more. Amanda identifies as FilipinX++, is a strong advocate for underrepresented groups in technology and has regularly served as a mentor for many inclusive programs including the 3G Summit: The Future of Girls, Gaming and Gender, The Fair Shot Project and YOUmedia Learning Labs Network. Blair Kuhlman works as a user experience/user interface (UX/UI) designer for Hi-Rez Studios in Alpharetta, Georgia, and has a passion for games with an independent spirit. “I’ve always been an artist at heart,” she says. She started college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she took a “really weird VR class that taught me about programming and a little bit about game design.” She “fell in love with that immediately,” she says. “I knew I wanted to switch to a college that really did have a video game career path for me, so I went to Columbia [College Chicago].” At Hi-Rez, Kuhlman helps create the layout and flow for games like Smite and its offshoot, Hand of the Gods. As she explains, “User interface is pretty much anything you see when you’re playing a game: menus, all the stuff that you go through before you drill into the game, like the front-end stuff. It’s pretty much everything that’s not the game play. User Experience is a little different—it’s from a psychology aspect, dealing with how we present information so it’s easy to understand.” The ride isn’t without bumps, including gender discrimination. “It’s kind of inevitable that you’re going to find somebody who is casting doubt on whether you should be in the space. This is sad, but I’ve gotten so used to it that it doesn’t even bother me anymore. I mean, I’ve kind of learned to let that stuff slide off of you and keep going,” she says. From her perspective, the future of gaming looks bright. “I am very optimistic,” she says. Adapted from Columbia College DEMO magazine And, of course, I included my own work. Grin And Bear It The World Is Flat? © 2012-2020 Theresa Devine. 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The Playkits The Playkit Project is an endeavor inspired by the Fluxkits of the 1960s. This will be a series of artworks curated by Associate Professor Theresa Devine that bring together artists working with PLAY. 2019-present