The Organic World

Montreal artist Paloma Dawkins makes games about nature—about our relationship to nature as humans, about the coexistence of urban sprawl and natural territory. Her work aims to make the audience consider nature, just for a moment, outside its context in our daily lives. It’s also insanely colorful, a testament to Dawkins’s fluid, rapid-fire creative process. By her own admission, she’ll never stop trying new things: not until she’s tried them all.

Before she created phantasmagoric landscapes in pale yellows, aquamarines, and vivid pinks, before she posted a series of animated .gifs on her website in which a series of squirrelly animals and humans walked in place ad infinitum, and before she released a game in which Christmas morning was reimagined as a series of shades and forms heretofore limited to Firecracker popsicles, Paloma Dawkins worked at Radio Shack.

“It was the only job I could do,” she says. After a year on the job, she says, “I just dropped everything and went full-on into art.”