Noelia Cruz - Violinist / Artist / Creative Director
Just a Video Game (2018)




This body of work emerges from the series Gotcha Paintings, a gestural response to the cultural normalization of gun violence in the United States. These paintings are provoked by the controversial video game Active Shooter, developed by Anton Makarevskiy, which allowed users to simulate the role of a school shooter. While the game was later removed from online platforms, its brief existence remains emblematic of a deeper cultural crisis, where entertainment and trauma are forced to converge.

Each piece in this series functions as a counter-memory.
In “It’s just a video game, not reality”, the artist juxtaposes Makarevskiy’s public defense of his game with a visual mapping of U.S. schools that have experienced fatal shootings since 2012. The quote in the title is not abstracted; it is confronted.

Game Stats overlays the game’s scoring system with a stark chronology of actual school shooting deaths in the U.S. since 2000, unsettling the line between game mechanics and national grief. “Just a bad timing”, another direct quote from Makarevskiy, investigates the dialectics of erasure and assimilation that occur when real suffering is commodified.

In Twinkle, Twinkle, the viewer encounters the original lullaby interwoven with a revised “Lockdown, Lockdown” version. An adaptation created by a kindergarten teacher to prepare children for the reality of in-school violence. The juxtaposition of innocence with strategy renders the piece devastatingly real.

The final work in the series, There’s no such thing as too much ammo, borrows from popular U.S. gun culture rhetoric. Through irony and critical distance, the piece probes the entanglement of nationalism, access to weaponry, and the myth of defense.

This series is not merely a reaction to a video game; it is a larger meditation on what happens when simulation eclipses mourning, and when policy fails to distinguish between play and harm.


Gotcha Paintings (2007–2010)


The first series of Gotcha Paintings emerged during the War in Afghanistan and Iraq as a visceral response to the way language distanced us from the reality of loss. I became attuned not only to violence—but to how violence is absorbed, reframed, and dulled through repetition. Terms like Casualties, Collateral Damage, and MIA became part of a televised rhythm that rendered human lives into abstractions. My work began to ask: What happens when grief is absorbed into discourse? When death becomes data?

Rather than depict violence, this series questions how it is assimilated—through screens, through systems, through the language we stop hearing. I call this dialectical assimilation—the slow, rhetorical conditioning that transforms tragedy into terminology.

Each painting in the series is titled after a phrase echoed across news cycles, headlines, and military briefings. One piece takes the form of a triptych, echoing the insignia of an army rank—folding the language of hierarchy into the composition.

These works are executed using paintball guns, a material and gesture that mirrors the absurdity of simulated war. The splatter is both mark and trace, echoing a trigger pulled and a body struck—yet mediated, symbolic, distant. The paint is non-lethal, but the suggestion is not.

Gotcha is a phrase of conquest. In this series, it becomes a critique of spectacle: a culture where games imitate war, and where war becomes just another channel.





PHOTOGRAPHY IS A STORY THAT TELLS ITSELF.

And Chicago has countless.

I started finding these narratives all around the inner city so rich and so telling. So photography captured me because I to remember the story.

In one storefront: Virgins, Dresses, Gunshot, and a Pope.
In the next: Latin Massage Combos.
Another pocket: Dilapidated stations of the Cross. 




THE CITY AS GARMENT. IDENTITY AS WEAR.

The office is something we wear—
and something that wears us.

This dress—woven of plexiglass, LED, metal, and rice paper—
is a question:

How much of ourselves do we embed in the City?
How much do we lend to the roles it casts us in?

Where does the body end and the City begin?
And when we shed the uniform,
what remains of us in its imprint?
©2025Noelia Cruz - Violinist / Multidisciplinary Artist
Website by Camila Cruz