Tim Portlock’s immersive digital cityscapes—rendered using 3-D computer gaming and special effects software—attempt to make real the discrepancy between the ideology of American exceptionalism and our lived experience. Blending traditional aesthetic tropes derived from nineteenth-century landscape painting with PS5 verisimilitude, his uncanny composites of US cities such as Philadelphia, San Bernardino, and St. Louis—where he’s now based—glitch conventional narratives for built environments that have been palpably reshaped by deindustrialization, white flight, and the aftermath of the housing crisis of 2008. His most recent exhibition, “Nickels from Heaven,” continues his interrogation of realism and identity construction and is currently on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis through February 21 as part of its Great Rivers Biennial.