It’s been a while since I have had the pleasure to review an art exhibition by Melusina Parkin. There are several reasons for this, both as a result of the physical world keeping Melu occupied and constraints on my own time. Hence why, when she passed me a personal invitation to see her latest collection, I was keen to find time and hop over.
Dreamscapes is a collection of 64 landscape images captured by Melu from around Second Life and displayed within her Minimal Gallery. Presented in Melu’s sharply-focused, minimalist style, all offer in a mix of soft tones and monochrome. Spread across the gallery’s two levels, it is a captivating display of images.
Mixing both old and new pieces, all with minimal (or no) post-processing, instead reliant on the image capabilities within the viewer itself, Dreamscapes takes the visitor on a tour of Second Life by revealing not the whole, but merely a part; a tree, a ruined lighthouse, a cabin on the sand, a broken fence, the corner of a motel or industrial building and its parking lot, and so on. In doing so, each opens the first page of a story – or perhaps the foreword to a dream.
What that story might be is personal to each of us; each picture given us just enough to set the imagination rolling. It’s a technique used by Melusina to great effect in her work, and here it serves a double purpose: it both prompts us to create narratives around what we see, and it demonstrates that Second Life itself is a place of the imagination; of dreams made real, the places we as creators would like to live within or visit. That it is, if I might borrow from Edgar Allan Poe as Melu borrows from Shakespeare, “a dream within a dream”.
In keeping with Melu’s more recent activities in respect to her exhibitions, Dreamscapes is also offered as a catalogue of prints presented under her Melubooks brand and costing L$100. I personally love this approach to additional presenting art in Second Life; we all only have so much space in-world in which to place images and presenting collections in this way offers a unique way be ways we can share them over and again at leisure.
As always, I thoroughly recommend Dreamscapes and Melusina’s art for your enjoyment.
SLurl Details
- Minimal Gallery (Lunula, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Happy and honoured with your words (as usual)!
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