Clare Gatto and Kara Güt: Magic Circle

In their first museum exhibition as collaborators, Clare Gatto and Kara Güt share their speculative interventions within the digitally-modified landscape of contemporary culture. Titled Magic Circle, the exhibition centers on fantasy roleplay video game design and motifs as points of departure and offers a glimpse into an alternate realm or reality. Through hybrid assemblages, the artists transform the gallery into an ambiguous “in-between” world that collapses the boundaries dividing the virtual from the “real.”

With roots in photography, Gatto and Güt use the photographic image as raw material within the construction of this hybrid space. Through a multi-layered process of abstraction, the artists push and pull once-familiar images of the natural environment, including volcanic rocks, sand, and bricks, in and out of virtual space to create a library of textures that intentionally elude easy recognition. Embedding these materials across a dispersed constellation of multimedia and sculptural objects, Magic Circle takes the form of a tangible landscape that embodies the porous and precarious duality between physical and digital worlds.

Popularized within gaming culture, the term ‘magic circle’ refers to the space in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a video game. Gatto and Güt invert and bend this idea to fit beyond the confines of a digital interface and transfer it to the physical world of the museum. Through sites of hybridity, the artists seek to play with and disrupt the normative or “rational” logics and binaries (the “normal rules”) informing the social and political systems, computer-generated or otherwise, that guide our everyday realities. In Magic Circle, Gatto and Güt create a momentary glitch in the system and give us space to embrace a sense of fluidity and uncertainty in the ways we define what’s real.