Lalie’s Breaths in Second Life

Update, January 15th, 2025: Artsville has relocated.

Having opened on August 21st, 2024 at Frank Atisso’s Artsville Galleries and Community, Lalie Sorbet’s Breaths is a visually engaging installation of animated 3D art and 2D elements accompanied by a subtle sound scape.

Lalie has a talent for producing art and installations that stand as moments in time, encouraging us to set aside the rush and hubbub of life and simply relax and be immersed in the beauty of what we are seeing. As I noted with Carousels, her work is gentle to the point of being hypnotic, wrapped in a natural, organic beauty.

With Breaths, Lalie further embraces all of the above in a most marvellous installation that is not there simply to be assessed or viewed, but to be experienced inwardly by encouraging us to see the animated elements as visual representations of one of our most fundamental autonomous acts: that of breathing.

Of all our autonomous acts, governed by several homeostatic mechanisms, breathing is the one of which we are perhaps most often consciously aware, and the one we might most readily consciously influence: we intentionally breath deeply to offset panic / fear  (and the primal  flight or fight reaction) and restore equanimity, or to help lower heart rate and bodily functions after excessive physical exertion, etc. During certain types of therapy, it is the mechanism we are often asked to focus upon to induce a state of relaxation, and so on. And the fact is, that the simple act of breathing is both naturally calming; an invisible force with a reach across every aspect of our lives; a natural cycle of inhalation and exhalation marked – when the rhythm is unforced – by natural pauses that can so induce a restful, composed state.

Breaths beautifully capture all of this through the gentle motion and pauses evident in the 3D elements and the 2D elements beneath them, coupled with their attendant sound scape (do have local sounds enabled). They encourage calmness, their motion gently hypnotic, working with the breath-like susurrations encouraging us to turn inwards and be aware of our own breathing, of our simple state of living within this very moment.

How one might interpret this installation is highly personal – leaving aside the risk of over-analysing. Hanging over the centre of the installation, for example is an element perhaps most clearly suggestive of breathing: a central spherical element offering, perhaps a suggestion of the fine networking of the lungs with the motion of air in and out of them on a that cyclic basis of inhalation and exhalation.

There is also the sheer organic look and feel to the individual spherical pieces and their 2D companions that encourages broader thinking. Within the animated spheres exotic shapes move; objects seem to divide and reform, or offer visions of what might be strange creatures suspended before us. Observing them individually in motion is like peering into the eyepiece of a powerful microscope and seeing the physical essence of life: cells dividing and joining, repairing damage, providing renewal and growth, or witness the motion of the microbes and antibodies that also play such a vital role in maintaining us as living, breathing organisms.

Breaths is a further rewarding and elegant installation by an artist with a gift of presenting us with images and reflections on the organic beauty of Nature and life. Richly layered yet utterly approachable, it is an exhibition that speaks for itself, whether seen purely as art-in-motion or as the metaphor it has been designed to be. When visiting, do be sure to have your viewer set to Use Shared Environment (World → Environment), and if you are using a non-PBR viewer, make sure you have Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) enabled via Preferences → Graphics.