Professor Angela Washko‘s solo exhibition “Are You: Mother, Player” will be on view at Public Works Administraiton April 5 through May 5. The gallery is located in Times Square at the entrance to the 50th Street station.
“You Are: Mother, Player” is a solo exhibition centered around Angela Washko’s newly completed project, “Mother, Player”, an experimental narrative video game featuring pregnancy and early parenthood stories from the artist (made during the global pandemic). Set within a backdrop of the tense 2020 United States election and a terrifying new international health crisis, players explore the maternal healthcare industry and parenting culture as a burnt out pansexual artist who has decided to have a child despite an increasingly discouraging geopolitical climate that deprioritizes and devalues care.
The game addresses the lack of multi-dimensional pregnancy and early parenthood stories in video games—something that the artist-game developer herself became sensitive to and critical of after becoming pregnant, giving birth, and taking care of a newborn during this isolated and uncertain time. All of the interfaces, animations, fonts, buttons, dialogue boxes, and icons have been hand drawn and animated by the artist, as part of a commitment to building a poetic, soft, labor-intensive, and complex game-world reflective of the childcare experiences she and the other artist parents have had during the pandemic. The exhibition situates the viewer into the expanded world of the game – presenting a new wallpaper installation made with the artist’s daughter’s paintings, a framed selection of hand-drawn frames of animation laboriously produced during the artist’s daughters naps, and the interactive game experience itself.