ATLA is pleased to present a two-person exhibition with Philadelphia-based ceramic artist Nick Lenker and Tokyo-based painter Shun Okada. Shun Okada and Nick Lenker’s playful intervention of contemporary painting and ceramics pulls apart themes coded within the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)/ Family Computer (Famicon)—a 1980s platform that was more than just a Japanese video game console. First released in Japan in 1983 as the Famicon and later to the U.S. market as the NES, the NES reshaped American pop culture and laid the groundwork for how we understand games, childhood, entertainment, and technology today. For all the virtual worlds that Okada and Lenker explore—Super Mario, Zelda, Kirby—games that are still culturally a part of children’s lives more than 40 years later, the world they cannot escape is the one that they inhabit. The “glitch” state that is so sharply captured within those games echoes through the many broken systems of our shared reality. It's as if we’re all living within an unresolved error code—looping, crashing, trying to reboot, and caught within a simulation of our own making.