In January 2024, Scylla Rhiadra presented an exhibition entitled Containers at Mareea Farrasco’s IMAGOLand Art Galleries (see: Containers: an artistic voyage of expression and constraint in Second Life). It offered an examination of how spaces – be they at home or at work or somewhere between, whether public or private – can both help organise and protect us as individuals whilst also giving us the freedom to fully express who we are, whilst at the same time they can also inform, contain, and constrain us in how we reveal ourselves to the world at large – and perhaps actually to ourselves as well.
Now, at HeArt and Soul Gallery, operated by Tom Willis and Lizzy Swordthain, she offers an exhibition of work which can be considered a further chapter on the theme, offering an alternative perspective. In Presence Scylla does not look and the manner in which the spaces we occupy and move through affect us – but how we impact the spaces and places through which we move, oftentimes long after we have departed.
We all leave a mark on the places we move through, and on life as a whole. The size of that mark obviously varies from the celebrated statesperson or global celebrity down through the favourite uncle or teacher from school; but our mark is undeniable:
We are presences even in those places where we are not, by virtue of our actual absence: we leave a trace embedded in what did not happen: the somethings we might have said that remain unspoken, or the somethings that might have been done that we were not present to do.
– Scylla Rhiandra, Presence, February 2024
As with Containers, the images Scylla supplies are studies in composition and narrative. Each holds a story, or at least a vignette which is clearly discernible. In addition, each image is again accompanied by a board containing a considered quotes from a piece of literature designed to further illustrate the image itself; and like those found in Containers, it is hard not to feel these selections offer insight into Scylla – and allow her to leave a further little “her shaped” hole in use which accompanies the one created by each picture. Certainly, I again felt that distant kinship with her purely through the pieces and authors she has selected.
Also like Containers, the collection making up Presence are layer in potential meaning and subtext. There is the meaning offer through the title of each piece, the reflection of that title and meaning through the selected text, the framing of the theme used to express the ide; all of which are expected. But then there are the more subtle aspects: those which lie in the way in which each piece chimes with us personally, the memories and thoughts conjured – perhaps most of all by the people who have touched our lives but who have now moved on in one way or another, only to leave one of those small holes in our thoughts and memories.
Another beautifully poignant and expressive series of Scylla.
SLurl Details
- HeArt and Soul Gallery (Durdanex, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 