After developing a game engine over the past 20 years, John Gerrard is using the tool to create simulations of Earth on the brink of extinction. He sees his digital works not as video art but as a contemporary form of sculpture. “This is a world, a three-dimensional world,” he has said of his art, “it behaves differently than traditional cinema, traditional video.” Like sculpture, he explains, it is “a three-dimensional scene which you can look at and turn around.” The centerpiece in his first major solo show with Pace is Flare, a huge screen, 18 x 18 feet, showing a smoking flame that resembles a burning flag. In the middle of a steel-blue ocean, it heats and blackens the wind. —Jensen Davis