Off the Board Game, Onto the Digital Canvas

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The capricious churn of internet-charged culture is producing more main characters, apocrypha and relics than we can handle. Remember when the Canadian musician known as Grimes — former partner of one of the world’s most powerful men, the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk — brought a sword to the 2021 Met Gala? The image of a futurist pop star lugging a medieval blade (made from a smelted AR-15, no less) down the red carpet summed up the mystifying way contemporary culture seems to run in all directions, chasing myths both new and old. Simon Denny, an artist working in Berlin, creates sculptures, installations, videos and prints inspired by the aesthetics of tech companies. In two concurrent shows in Manhattan he has seized on omens like the blade to explore the sociopolitical fallout of the technology industry’s taste for medieval lore. In Denny’s telling, dreams of wizards and blacksmiths, dark forests and dank castles shape the newest digital realms. “Dungeon,” Denny’s fifth show with Petzel Gallery in New York, features a kind of heaving shrine to Grimes: Puffs from an automatic steamer inflate a black “Game of Thrones” T-shirt once owned by the star, installed in a Plexiglas case like a suit of armor. The sculpture is plugged into a power strip that Denny sourced from a liquidation sale at Twitter during its Musk-mandated transition to X.