A Night for Flesh and Roses

A Night for Flesh and Roses is a single player, gothic, borderline romantic, visual novel where players investigate a strange imagined future, those living in it, and construct their own ideas of bodies. Surrounding players is an immersive, physical installation creating passages of fleshy/fabric textured collages that evoke the style of the game itself. The work explores games in non-sterile, tactile, and playful ways, bridging digital and analog spaces. It continues the tradition of indie games that are messy, trans, and full of monsters.

Elliot Rex White is an artist from Los Angeles, California currently working in Santa Cruz. They primarily create experimental narrative games drawing from a sculpture and digital illustration practice. Influenced heavily by science fiction and body horror, they utilize speculative biology to explore ways personal embodiment can extend into strange new forms as well as how the monster can be a place of identity. Their work mingles together the grotesque, comedic, and sometimes unsettling to articulate experiences of neurodivergent trans life. Their games and animation works have been featured at the UC Davis Film Festival, 2018 & 2019, the Melbourne Queer Games Festival, 2020, and UCSC’s Arts Division Open Studios, 2023. Their dragon puppet design and fabrication for Unibeauty and Her Wicked Daughters was performed by UCSC’s theater department, also in 2023. They are a graduate from UC Davis with a BFA in Studio Art and Cinema & Digital Media and will graduate from UC Santa Cruz’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program in Spring 2024.