Day: July 24, 2023

A Touch of Magic is the title Lori Bailey has given to her latest art exhibition, opened at the Lost Unicorn Gallery on July 23rd, 2023. Curated by Natalie Starlight and Nessa Nova, who together operate the always enchanting Lost Unicorn estate, the gallery is a fitting venue of Lori’s art, offering as it does a fantasy-style venue within its fairy tale castle walls that is entirely in keeping with Lori’s dream-like images.

Like myself, Lori is one of Second Life’s travellers, spending her time exploring regions and settings across the grid, and recording the things she sees in photographs presented through her Flickr account. Also like myself, she enjoys playing with EEP settings and experimenting with them to produce her core images.

However, and quite unlike, me, she possesses an artist’s eye and a compositional style that combine to produce genuinely enchanting images of the the places she visits, together with thoroughly engaging avatar studies (an ability I have never come close to mastering), in which post-processing plays a minor role compared to the overall original composition and framing of each picture.

All of this is every much in evidence within A Touch of Magic as it occupies the main lower gallery space at Lost Unicorn Gallery, mixing avatar studies and landscape pieces with easy grace whilst fully demonstrating Lori’s self-developed talent as a Second Life photographer-artist.

Noting that she prefers other tools to PhotoShop, she exposes her pieces to minimal re-touching / editing, tending to limit such activities to colour enhancement, some depth of field blurring, and light touches to adjust light. The result of this are images which have an genuine ethereal air about them, which has unique, and very different ways of drawing the observer into them.

Within the landscape pieces, this etherealness manifests as unique interpretations of the the locations captured, allowing us to view the scenes through Lori’s eyes and imagination whilst simultaneously both presenting their beauty while also translating it into a dreamlike, almost empyrean state, where  light become a gossamer, almost tactile presence which seems to drift through each piece as if as much a physical part of the scene despite its impalpable nature, making it as much an embodiment of the scene as anything to be be found within it, be it tree, plant, boat, object or structure.

For the avatar studies, this ethereal quality gives a sense of narrative and emotion that reaches well beyond the limits of the image itself; a narrative mostly clearly, perhaps, suggested through a gaze directed beyond the canvas by the subject of the image, or through the look being exchanged between those featured within the image.

Like the music she adores and which forms such an important part of her life (something else we happen to share; I am rarely without music surrounding me), Lori’s art is melodic in form and presentation, each piece combining individual notes and movements – from focus to subject, to lighting to environment – to deliver a finished pieces which, whilst “symphonic” might sound overly descriptive, are undeniably  both lyrical and harmonious – and a delight to the eye and the imagination.

SLurl Details

• Lost Unicorn Gallery (rated: Moderate)