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Today we offer up a guest post by artist Jonathan Monaghan, whose video work, Rainbow Narcosis, is featured in State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now.  You can view clips from the work here. –LD

Playing video games as a child, I was always much more interested in exploring the created environments rather than playing the actual game. Although cinematic in composition, my work perhaps shares more with these video game environments than cinema. With my video installations, there is no film, no filming, no actors, few edits, no dialogue, and usually no specific beginning or end. Orchestrated in a virtual computer space, my works act more as windows into another world, another dimension, a kind of alternate reality. This world is fantastical and bizarre, but parallels our own, where imagery of power, wealth, and authority are conflated with consumerism, science fiction, ancient mythologies, and historical works of art. For example, Office combines historical and contemporary depictions of wealth and power. In the film, marble busts of Baroque-era aristocrats mounted on props from the cult science fiction film Tron explode in slow-motion within modern office cubicles.