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 response to the way language distanced us from the reality of loss. It was an attunement to the loss of attunement itself, to how violence was reframed and numbed 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 and loss of life is reduced to data?

This series wonders how we assimilate and erase tragedy through rhetorical conditioning, through screens, games, and reframed language.

Each painting in the series is titled after a phrase echoed across news cycles, headlines, and military briefings. The triptych Collateral Damage is composed in the form of an army rank insignia.

These works are executed using oil-based paintball guns, chosen as material, gesture, and medium of assimilation.

Gotcha questions its own celebratory statement and the hyperreality channels that blur those lines



THE SEVEN SACRED POOLSKishwauketoe, Wishkosnak
2025 
Storefront and Cityscapes Series
Chicago, IL 

-Latin Massage Combo, Storefront Series, Chicago 
- Virgins, dresses, shotguns and a Pope, Storefront
- Stations of the cross, Chicago IL 


FASHION SCULPTURE - plexiglass, keychains, LED, metal, and rice paper

©2025
Noelia Cruz - Violinist / Multidisciplinary Artist
Website by Camila Cruz