David Lockwood, The New West: Exploration of the Geological Parallel, 2020, VR photography exhibition at Open Eye Gallery
Nominated by Sarah Fisher, Open Eye Gallery.
The New West is a virtual reality exhibition curated by David Lockwood (UK) with the assistance of his son Hugo. Echoing the work of pioneering artists and photographers from the 1870s who captured the American West the exhibition charts their exploration as avatars, Arthur Morgan and John Marston, travelling within the rapidly evolving geographies of the Red Dead Redemption adventure video game. Photographs from the avatars archives and thoughts from their diary have been printed and hung on the Open Eye Gallery walls, filmed by a VR camera and the show posted back online. Here Lockwood plays with layers of mediation, asking us to question our relationship with the documenting of landscape and the human impact on the natural world, by connecting perceptions of the past with our knowledge of the present.
Lockwood is a photographer based in Liverpool and currently completing his PhD at Liverpool John Moores University.