Realm Bound

Kailee Bal paints stills from branching video games narratives to explore the anxieties reflected in everyday decision making. She photographs her everyday life that mimics the aesthetics of video games that blur the line between the escape to virtual worlds combined with the escape found in the act of painting and taking photographs. These are usually moments in a game where the player must make a choice that determines the next objective. Bal uses imagery from video games within the horror genre as the landscape to explore difficulties of anxiety and apprehension in daily life. Her subject matter focuses on doorways, windows, stairs, and holes that splinter into different unseen avenues where one must decide where they will go. Bal sees these as liminal spaces, where she paint with scumbled, atmospheric brushstrokes, emphasizing the unknowable content of a game when it’s first played, and those first choices must be made.