Abigail Conte

Studio Art and Biological Sciences major

   2020 Thesis Project in Studio Art   

In my work, I explore queer identity. I am most interested in the choices that people make that shape and express their identities, particularly decisions made through play. Play, as a form of activity that is separate from "ordinary" life, ranges from the free-wheeling play of children's make-believe to rule-bound strategy games. Play can serve as escapism, but particularly in play that involves taking on alternate identities, choices made in the name of escapism have the potential to reflect very real desires and goals. Visually, I am interested in working with and combining multiple mediums, particularly painting and printmaking. Additionally, I am interested in game design as an art form. My perspective on game design is shaped equally by conceptual art movements that value process over results and by games written by contemporary independent game designers. My games center the agency of the player and integrate queer identity as a central tenet of their structure instead of an incidental occurrence; they are informed by my experiences both as a player and as a lesbian.

The World We Built

gouache, watercolor, printmaking

This book was not supposed to be a book.

There was going to be a book of the game I wrote, placed on a pedestal and available to be flipped through, but it wasn't supposed to be the book. The game inside the book was meant to be played by upwards of fifteen Wellesley students, each constructing new worlds and identities that were made with the rules of the game that I had written, a game that celebrated queerness and power and agency in play. The final thesis exhibit was going to be a visual homage to the characters that players had played, and the ways that fantasy tabletop roleplaying games could serve as a source of expression for queer people.

Instead, my thesis takes the form of a book and a promise that play will endure.

Books are physical and lasting in a way that a cloud-hosted text document (where the rules were previously kept) is not. The process of transferring the game into an illustrated physical form forced me to reconsider the purpose of the game, its value as a stand-alone work instead of a generative tool for the illustrations I had planned. As originally written, The Outer Reaches of Who We Can Be was designed to function as a game for a particular moment, and was only meant to be played while I was in the process of working on my senior thesis. However, when that moment was taken away, I found solace in the permanence of placing my words on paper.

Cultural anthropologist Johan Huizinga writes that "the inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath." Part of the reason that I think these games are so valuable for expression of desires and as an outlet to feel power and control over our lives is how quickly players can slip between the worlds delineated by the rules. The last session I played at Wellesley to aid in designing the game was on March 11th, by which point the fact of us leaving campus was inevitable, it was just a matter of when they would tell us.

I came very close to cancelling, but once play began, I found myself caught in the flow that appears when everybody at the table is committed to the story. We moved from shared anxiety to shared laughter within minutes, bonded over the world we had just created and the lesbian romance that emerged in the story. This particular story could not have been told by anyone other than the two of us, two queer women with unique experiences and points of inspiration to draw on; it simultaneously took us to a place where we were able to escape the distress that had been slowly creeping across campus. It was a very real moment that gave me some semblance of feeling in control, and it was also a very funny game where guild bureaucracies complicated to the point of absurdity determined what adventure the player's character would go on. For a few hours, we left seriousness far beneath for a place that was uniquely ours.

We will get there again.

<< previous artist |  back to HEREthere |  next artist >>