Arden Bendler Browning

"Elastic Geography.EXT", 2023, interactive web-based 360 video of a custom virtual reality painting over photographs of "Elastic Geography" mural and photographs of Philadelphia, accompanied by ambient city and restaurant sounds, made to accompany Yards Brewery's Made in Phila beer label featuring images of my mural on their building. Video is navigable by touchscreen, and also slowly pans through the space.

excerpt of video interview with Roberta Fallon of Philly Art Blog, describing the video capture of my custom virtual reality work "Pathfinding" at Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, fall 2022.

"Pathfinding", 2022, custom virtual reality (VR) application shown in tandem with solo exhibition of paintings and new media titled "Wayfinding" at Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia. Compressed and flattened images of selected paintings expand upon the virtual floor and then gradually grow upward around the viewer, like a pop-up book. Three-dimensional virtual marks project outward and upward from the painting, and viewers can explore by walking through the virtual painted environment.

Video projection on "Distillery Pine (painting) ", as exhibited at Bridgette Mayer Gallery during "Wayfinding", September-October 2022.

"Sightreading" at Galleri Urbane, Dallas, November -December 2019. When a viewer walks through the VR worlds while wearing the headset, other viewers can observe a live stream on the monitor.   The surrounding paintings were all made in response to watching videos of individual scenes in this VR work.

"Scenic Lookouts" (2019), a custom virtual reality (VR) work, premiered in "Sightreading" at Galleri Urbane, Dallas, in November 2019, and later featured in "Fields and Formations" at the Delaware Contemporary and the American University Museum, September 2021-May 2022. This work is composed of a grouping of floating islands based on roadtrip travel watercolors. Viewers can explore only one individual platform at a time, but can see all of the others far out in space. A small ripple appears on the floor, and when viewers walk onto it, the image fades out and they are teleported to one of the distant platforms.

"Middle of Somewhere" (2019), a custom virtual reality (VR) work, premiered at "Sightreading" at Galleri Urbane, Dallas, in November 2019, and later featured in "Fields and Formations" at the Delaware Contemporary and the American University Museum, September 2021 through May 2022. This work contains several "rooms" where enlarged images of small drawings and paintings formed walls, floors and ceilings in semi confined spaces. Using VR painting programs, I built out 3D marks to create dense, walkable abstract worlds. Viewers can peek through walls and paintstrokes. Upon walking towards an animated ripple on the floor, the images fade out and viewers are teleported to other vantage points and rooms made of different images and marks.

Video clips of "Escape Routes" (2021), a custom virtual reality (VR) work using Tiltbrush (VR Painting software) to expand, evolve, and re-imagine a selection of paintings exhibited in an exhibition also titled "Escape Routes" at Tinney Contemporary, Nashville,  July 24-August 31, 2021. The VR work contains 9 scenes which invite viewers to walk through immersive 3D virtual paintings with digital images of the physical paintings in the real gallery space as floor, backdrop, and distant depths. The participant's hand is depicted in this clip, since participants have the option of casting shadows with their left hand.

When the Covid-19 global quarantine necessitated a cancellation of a long planned trip to Peru and Ecuador, I made my usual lap size travel drawings while clicking through our planned itinerary on Google Maps Street Views while shut in at home in Philadelphia. Several months later when the sadness had evolved, I imported a selection of those drawings into Tilt Brush and made a VR world out of my imagined travel experience. This is a video tour of that VR environment, which then informed the basis of a large painting.