Leo Castaneda
Leo Castaneda (born in Cali, Colombia 1988) is an artist based in Miami and New York, who works in the intersection of painting and virtual reality.
He uses these among other mediums such as drawing, interactive sculpture, and animation to analize and deconstruct the structures of video-games, and how these structures relate to those of Art and the world at large.
Castaneda received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2010, and in 2014 is finishing up his MFA at Hunter College. In 2014 Castaneda received a scholarship from the Cisneros Foundation to attend SOMA Summer in Mexico City. He has also attended a semester abroad in Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, and studied in New World School of the Arts in Miami.
"My work is an effort to turn the structures of video gaming into a lens to analize the world. "Levels", "Bosses", "Items", "Continues", "Extra Lives", and much more are the words that dominate the world of virtual entertainment. These labelling systems delineate and provide hierarchies reminiscent of both ancient mythologies and corporate structures, while highlighting the arbitrariness of their boundaries and naming".