ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH’S BLOOD PAINTINGS

Georgie Roxby Smith, Blood Paintings, digital video, 2024, still

VRAL is currently showcasing Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings series as a single channel machinima. Today we take a closer look at her process to highlight key themes and contextualize her aesthetic choices.

At first glimpse, the lurid black and red canvases of Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings betray little of the cold, mechanical violence from whence they emerged. Yet the intra-triptych of videos, prints and photographs accompanying each finished piece document one of the most conceptually daring artistic processes within game art in recent memory, bridging virtual chaos and physical creation.

The genesis occurs not with “traditional” brushes, but with a stolen sedan careening down the endless freeways of Grand Theft Auto V’s sprawling fictional city, Los Santos. Smith ritualistically mows down random pedestrian after pedestrian, indifferent to the piled corpses littering her wake, or rather, using them as a source material. Through an online machinima feed, these virtual “vehicular blood harvests” stream to screens in her corporeal studio. Eyes locked on the carnage, the vampiric artist enacts swift gestural translations of each fresh victim into pigment. Ram, observe, render, repeat: a piece takes shape with each new mark responding to lives callously extinguished in a doom loop of hit-and-hit-and-hit-and-drag.

When the gameplay session concludes, having claimed several bystanders sacrificially for the sake of her work, Smith reviews the tapes from alternate camera angles. She zooms in on singular moments of compressed brutality, photoshopping images together with her physical canvas snapshots. These digital/physical hybrids form the third component in presenting each unique Blood Painting. Beside them, innocuous “art selfies” feature the artist clutching her macabre works with almost maternal pride rather than horror at their genesis.

These self congratulatory portraits seem jarringly incongruous beside the disturbing machinima footage of pedestrian carnage used to inspire…

(continues)

Matteo Bittanti

Works cited

Georgie Roxby Smith

Blood Paintings

digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024, Australia

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EVENT: GEORGIE ROXBY SMITH (FEBRUARY 2 - 15 2024, ONLINE)

Blood Paintings

digital video, color, sound, 11’ 06”, 2024, Australia

Created by Georgie Roxby Smith

Georgie Roxby Smith’s Blood Paintings series merges digital gaming spaces and physical art. Each piece comprises three distinct components: a machinima documenting repetitive violence against GTA V pedestrians, intimate selfies showcasing the finished abstract paintings that violence yields, and hybrid digital/physical prints combining in-game imagery with organic artistic styles. This unique, multi-format presentation offers insight into both the meticulous creative process and the provocative contrast between clinical virtual acts and tactile human artistry.

Georgie Roxby Smith is a pioneering digital artist who uses gaming, AI, video, and performance to probe modern identity and reality. Her work focuses on representing marginalized groups, especially women, in online environments. Artworks like The Fall Girl and 99 Problems [WASTED] expose violence against female video game characters, critiquing the misogyny embedded in gaming worlds. Smith’s bold, confrontational, socially-engaged art has exhibited globally and earned prestigious grants and residencies. As virtual and actual boundaries blur, her practice reveals hard truths about identity and systemic bias persisting digitally. Blending emerging tech and mass media, Smith dispels notions of liberation in our increasingly visual world. Her immersive works harbor the probing questions that will propel digital art to its next avant-garde evolution.

EVENT: CHRISTIAN WRIGHT (OCTOBER 14-27 2022, ONLINE)

SON

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), colour, sound, 14’ 59”, 2016, United Kingdom

Created by Christian Wright

Christian Wright reframes painting and cinema through the medium of the video game. Inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and by the extended duration of slow cinema, the artist references historical events and religious themes, but also fictional narratives, sagas and myths of the near future, introducing an expanded narrative that defies easy categorizations. Part of a trilogy, Son investigates the spiritual through the technical, using the notion of ritual as a point of departure. By emphasizing the in-between, the interstitial, and the liminal, the work transforms inactivity into revelation, emptiness into wholeness.

Christian Wright (b. 1993, Newcastle upon Tyne) is a digital media artist working with video games and animated assets to blend cinematic and machinima visual languages. Through this frame, he looks at how the boundaries of normal play are stretched by the performative actions of players themselves. Whether it be the intimate physical interactions of online multiplayer, the choreographed quest for perfection of speedrunning, or the mimetic act of digital cosplay within character creators, Christian places community driven gestures at the forefront.

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