The Burn 2 Art Committee has released the details of artists formally invited to display at this year’s Burn 2 event. In a statement issued by the organisers, the artists:

“Were chosen through an intensive selection process which involved a vastly encompassing variety of criteria to determine through consensus those whom we feel best represent a wide sample of creativity, technique, artistic expression, and resourcefulness that best expresses the spirit and values of Burning Man and  Burn 2.”

The selected artists are:

Rebeca Bashly

A Serbian artist, Rebeca has been active in Second Life for almost four years, and uses only her own sculpts and textures in her work. She regards her most significant work in SL as being “SnowCrash” on UTSA Artspace, a collaborative work with Igor Ballyhoo.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rebecabashly/

Claudia222 Jewell

Claudia222 has been involved in Second Life since mid-2007, working primarily in fantasy sculptures which use rich, vibrant organic textures to bring them to life. Her first SL build, “Parallel Worlds”, was exhibited on the sim FarStar in January of 2011. She has also exhibited at Pirats Art Network, The  Nordan om Jordan  gallery and has entered her work at the UWA Expositions and SL8B, where she built a honey swamp.

Claudia222’s work most recently caught the imaginations of many residents when her mesh creations were featured in a Machinima by Rockerfaerie, previously featured in this blog. She is currently working on a sky level installation “mesh mellows”.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59764397@N07/

Oberon Onmura

Active in SL since December 2006, Oberon Onmura has been making art in Second Life for over two years. In that time, his unique approach to using opposing forces on physical objects has attracted the attention of blog sites, SL and RL galleries and publications. He has recently become interested in the use of scripted agents (i.e. bots) as artmaking material.

His early work with physical objects, “Grid Floaters,” was seen at the “Kiss the Sky” exhibition at the NMC ArtsLab sim, curated by DanCoyote Antonelli, while “Beacon,” a 100-meter tower that constructs and then destroys itself, was selected for inclusion in a national exhibition of virtual and corporeal art – the “@ Exhibition” (www.arsvirtua.com) – in association with the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles, California (February, 2009).

More recently, his sim-sized projects, “The Tunguska Event” , “Storm Cells,”  and “Four Galaxies” were seen at the Project Z Gallery. His collabortive work includes working with Juria Yoshikawa and Dancoyote Antonelli for a SL/RL event with a  jazz club in London, curated by Arahan Claveau. He has also collaborated with Diogenes Wylder (Georgie Roxby-Smith) at the Watermill Center (USA) and Melbourne (AUS). Currently, Oberon exploring the creative possibilities of Opensim grids, running two simulator servers on his home computer in NYC, with the sims, Titania and Elena connected to the Craft grid (http://craft-world.org:8002/).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oberon_onmura

RAG Randt

RAG Randt – the RAG standing for Richard A Goldberg, grew up under the influence of Mad Magazine, Warner Brothers cartoons, and the New Yorker Magazine. He creates artwork for publishers, advertisers, and corporations. His style translates concepts into humorous, thought-provoking art which enables his client’s  messages to be memorable and effective.

http://www.drawger.com/rag/

Starlash Sweetwater

Starlash will be exhibiting “Identity” at Burn 2, which has a quote from Vithu Jeyaloganathan, “The identity of one changes with how one perceives reality.”

Starlash describes herself as being, “Born at the age of 4 to confuse enemy agents. Growing up in the Central Kalahari Desert and later London has left her with a fertile and vivid imagination which fuels her desire to actualize and add a unique perspective to her creations.”

To date she has had showings of her 2D work at several galleries and has recently started to bring her stories to life with machinima.  Using second life as inspiration she is constantly trying new techniques and mediums to evolve her work.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/starlash

Trill Zapatero

Trill describes herself thus: “Artist maybe, painter, BFA. in Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba, love to travel, draw, paint, make stuff.Canadian, activist with Four Bridges and amnesty international. Curator and Builder of the War and Peace Exhibit at the Howard Zinn Memorial Centre for Social Consciousness and the Arts as well as the Afghanistan Virtual Museum in SL. Illustrator and co-author of It’s All Chinese to Me  – a culture and etiquette guide to China’ by Gwen Penner and Pierre Ostrowski: friend, lover, sister, daughter, dog lover, coffee drinker, piano player, book reader, pizza eater…”.

Of his work, she says, “Welcome to the Fool’s journey to the end of the universe and back., through all the pitfalls and trials of identity and desire, to death and beyond, through the  gauntlet of useless rusty grails offered up by religion and ideology, through a modernist purgatory, and into the heart and soul of the crumbling grail castle reclaimed by nature and love. all steps along the way leading to the ultimate discovery of the true grail”.

http://tinyurl.com/trillzap