A Drowning Sim’s Cry for Help humorously tries to make sense of the absurdity of the everyday, mental health, and mortality by taking cues from computer games and children’s entertainment.
Various works in the exhibition celebrate and critique the naive and humorous ways the media censors explicit content to provide a temporary relief from reality. The use of humour is explored on one hand, as a way to cope with intense emotion and trauma, and on the other, as a psychological tool to revisit, process and gain perspective on past events.
The exhibition’s title references the 2004 life simulation PC game, The Sims 2 and the particular act of a player drowning and ultimately killing their Sim.
Ursula Larin is a Brisbane-based artist who uses sculpture, video, photography and installation to reinterpret small, poignant moments from her everyday experience. Her sculptures either draw inspiration from, or closely replicate the peculiar details from these moments through an assemblage of accessible scrap, craft and building materials and an amateur, do-it-yourself skillset. These sculptures function as allegories that use humour, parody, and a childlike playfulness to explore existential quandaries around the absurd, awkward, confusing and disappointing aspects of the human experience. Ursula completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at Queensland University of Technology in 2016, and has exhibited locally at Artist Run Initiatives including Cut Thumb and Kunstbunker.
