For I-20’s summer show, Timothy Hutchings has created The World’s Largest Wargaming Table, an installation stretching throughout the gallery that comments on history and technology, abstraction and site, while pondering the subject of war and hobbies. Hutchings’s installation is a functional super-sized war game table (400 square feet), made of MDF, wood and carved styrofoam, that complies with mapping criteria and can be used by serious game players: a working surface for soldier figurines governed by battle rules.

The World’s Largest Wargaming Table is a continuation of Hutchings’s obsessions with the past, ideal places, and the logic of war, but without the technology of his faux 8-millimeter films like The Arsenal at Danzig and Other Views (2001), in which destroyed Eastern European landmarks were brought back to life in fake period films shot by tourists; and in Player vs. Player (2004), with its black humor when a mountain climber turns upon his companion after reaching an alpine summit. In A Lark in the Larkin (2005), a destroyed Buffalo landmark made by Frank Lloyd Wright was brought to life in a faux war recruiting film disguised as a silent musical and dancing extravaganza.

The new installation is about territory, warfare, minimalism and the charm of the miniature. It’s an art object as well as a gaming surface awaiting action, and only activated as such when it is being used.

There will be an accompanying edition of silk-screen prints, Caverns of Ouroboros – E2, that are loosely based on the game maps that were included with Dungeons and Dragons, and which are definitely tied to the idea of gaming and the table.

Timothy Hutchings will have a solo exhibition at the Vienna Kunsthalle in 2008, and his work will be featured in “Twenty Five Years Later” at Art In General later this year. Other exhibitions include “Greater New York,” “Some Young New Yorkers,” and “B-Hotel” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; “Videodrome II,” New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; “Metropolis Now,” Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and “SUBMERGE, Kunstebunker Forum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Nürnberg, Germany.

Hutchings was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1974. He was educated at the Kansas City Art Institute, and received his MFA from the Yale University School of the Arts. He lives and works in New York.