Bakhmut, Ukraine

Artie Galerie presents Sky World, a collection by Kevin Esherick of 24 real world images from significant global events throughout 2024, transported into video game worlds.

In Native cosmologies, "Sky World" is a place of origin, a celestial ground where stories begin and structure descends. Esherick reframes this not as belief, but as interface. A contemporary cosmogony where the substance of reality emerges from the screen.
This is the world rendered here: Its logic holds. It’s just not lived. Real without realism. We aren’t witnesses—we’re an audience. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s displacement. Sky World asks what happens when experience is no longer lived but viewed, shared, and (of course) gamified.

Esherick offers no judgment, just a structure. Simulation here is cast as a superstructure for a new kind of reality, a copy of the past that feels real but no longer reflects truth.
From sacred narrative to algorithm. Stars to systems. Fact to belief. Memory to meme.