Concepts:Demo(s): Levels&Bosses: Leo Castañeda

Showcasing wall drawings and wallpapers from his interactive video game “Levels&Bosses” this installation shows the development and hand processes behind the characters, worlds and abilities within in the video game. Drawings from Castaneda’s sketchbook become life size character sheets that allow passersby the opportunity to encounter the processes, characters and worlds from the video game in a physical space.

This exhibition is simultaneous to Castañeda’s solo exhibition, “Demo(s): Levels&Bosses” at Tile Blush gallery showcasing paintings and video by mutating between analog and digital to render worlds where landscapes, technology, and entities all share sentience and interconnection.

Levels&Bosses Demo(s) is made possible with support from Locust Projects-Wavemaker grants, and Oolite Arts – The Ellies.

About the Artist

Leo Castañeda (b. Cali, Colombia 1988) is an experimental game designer and multi-media artist living in Miami, FL. Fusing gaming, painting, virtual reality, drawing, and interactive sculpture, Castañeda’s work probes how the language and structures of video games intersect with the world at large. Through open mythologies built across feedback loops between analog and digital, Castañeda’s work reimagines the corporeal, ecological, and socio-political anatomies that govern our cultural operating systems.

Castañeda received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2010 and MFA at Hunter College in 2014. Residencies include SOMA Mexico City (2014); “Of Games III” at Khoj International in New Delhi India (2015); Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship (2017), and Oolite Arts Studio Residency (2018–2019). In 2019 the Wolfsonian-FIU Museum commissioned Castañeda to create a video animation. He is also a recipient of South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual/Media Artists Fellowship, Locust Projects Wavemaker Grant, and Oolite Arts Ellies Creator Award. After two years as a professor of 3-D animation at Florida International University, Castañeda currently teaches 3-D animation at New World School of the Arts.