Blip’s Black and White World in Second Life

Currently open within the Suburbs sky gallery space at Mareea Farrasco’s IMAGOLand, is an exhibition of photography by Blip Mumfuzz. Entitled Black and White, it is perhaps a slight departures from Blip’s past exhibitions in that – as the name implies – Blip eschews her usual lean towards a richness of colour palette and explorations of tone and colour within her landscapes and images, as seen with the likes of Exaggerations (reviewed in 2022), or for capturing the mood and tone of entire regions, as seen within Images of Skrunda (also reviewed in 2022) in favour of a dive into the world of black-and-white photography / image processing.

And it is another tour-de-force demonstration of both images capture and processing; the section of images found within the two hangers  of the gallery space (and outside on the tarmac!) are simply eye-popping in their depth and content.

I’ve long admired Blip’s art because of her many abilities and approaches. She has, for an example, an eye for creating images that hover between offering a complete scene whilst simultaneously encouraging the eye to focus down with macro-like intensity onto individual elements – a pot apparently tossed aside here, a towel draped over a bath there, and to on – imbuing the completed image with a layer of prompts which may prompt the imagination to create a story.

For example: who hung the cap on the handle of a garden fork? Was it the gardener taking time out to mop his or her brow, or a youngster who has decided they don’t want the encumbrance of the hat whilst playing?  Or is it simply, like the sheets hanging on the line behind it, just set out to dry in the day’s sunlight?  And what of the corner of an old building (or barn?) where a door stands open, the darkness inside beckoning? What might we find on stepping through? At the same time her compositional skill can produce images that blur the line between the digital and the physical to the point the eye can be tricked into thinking it is looking at a scene from the latter rather than the former.

In other words, Blip has an innate ability to draw us into her images, to not so much see them, but experience and explore them; and this is more than evidenced within Black and White. Admittedly, not all of the images presented are necessarily new creations; there was at least one I recognise for certain from Blip’s Images of Skrunda and one I seem to recall from Urban and Industrial Images (2021, and reviewed here), although I’m not 100% certain on the latter.

But the fact that these images may well reply of post-processing to achieve their monochromatic finish doesn’t matter. Black and white photography / processing is in many respects a lot harder than working with colour; it is an unforgiving mistress prone to highlighting errors and imperfections – and this is true when converting colour images to black-and-white; yes, often the software will do the basics for you, but to get the genuine look and tone of a black-and-white image, with its clarity of line, light, shadow and so on, takes time and practice. And as these piece show, Blip has an artist’s skill in bringing this factors to the fore such that the pieces in this collect stand more as monochrome “originals” that anything that started life in the world of colour-.

In being completely honest, I could have perhaps done without the nose and wing of a 747 being shoved through the the roofs of the hanger galleries – by a quick right-click derender soon eliminated that such that it did not intrude on my enjoyment and appreciation of this collection – and as such, I again strong commend it as being well worth viewing.

SLurl Details

• IMAGOLand and Art Galleries (Androviel, rated Moderate)