Philosophy and art can make for an interesting coupling; on the one hand, philosophy can trigger an artistic response that in turn might serve to illustrate the central thesis being discussed; on the other, art triggered by a philosophical precept can go on to spur thinking and reflection which can reach beyond the original focus of both the art and / or the precept it initially illustrated.
Such is the case with Scylla Rhiadra’s Almost, a compelling series of pieces of art with accompanying textual extracts (often a common element within Scylla’s work), which opened to public display on March 20th, 2025 at Mareea Farrasco’s IMAGO Art Galleries.
As I’ve noted in covering past exhibitions of her work, Scylla is one of the most gifted communicators in Second Life; her ability to to use art to convey ideas, feelings, realities and truths, and/or to expose concepts and ideas and encourage the grey stuff between the ears to fire on all available cylinders, is second to none. Nor is she unfamiliar with building upon philosophical thinking to explore our notions of what it is to be human, to live, to move through life; in this I would point to Swerve, her exhibition from 2024 which grew out of reflections on atomism as prompted by Titus Lucretius Carus (see Scylla’s Swerve at Nitroglobus in Second Life for more).
Within Almost she takes as her seed the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea – specifically one of his Paradoxes of Motion (which are perhaps the most well-known of his paradoxes), which Scylla refers to as his “Atalanta Paradox”, but which is perhaps better know as the Dichotomy Argument.
In this Zeno asks us to imagine the Greek heroine and athlete running half the distance to a finishing line, and then requires us to notionally half the remaining distance and time again, and again, and again, ad infinitum. The “logical” and mathematically “provable” corollary of this exercise is the realization that the runner will never reach her goal; she will merely get closer and closer, by smaller and smaller spatial and temporal increments.
– Scylla Rhiadra, introducing Almost
The Dichotomy Argument, together with Achilles and the Tortoise and Zeno’s Arrow Paradox are regarded as such because between them, they postulate that everything is, to all intents a purposes, motionless. Atalanta can never finish her race; Achilles can never catch the tortoise, that at any given point in its flight, the arrow is in fact standing still. Not only does this mean the races / arrow flight can never be completed – they can never actually commence – which is clearly a logical fallacy, given they can and do. This fallacy offers some interesting lines of thinking, as Scylla goes on to note:
I found the concept an interesting metaphorical approach to understanding what it means to be “human,” existing in real time and space. In some ways, we are always “almost” something or another, in part because we are always in the process of becoming — of “almost” being someone or somewhere else — and because it is a fundamental condition of human existence that we never achieve an ultimate, absolute state.
– Scylla Rhiadra, introducing Almost
Thus, within this series, Scylla presents images which explore the dichotomy created within Zeno’s paradoxes in a highly visual manner. Each offers a complete story on the human condition within its frame, whilst simultaneously presenting the potential for much broader narratives.
In this they are like Atalanta’s race – just as they almost present a “finished” image and idea, so to do they hint at a further measure of consideration, a further line of narrative, drawing the imagination onwards towards a line of “understanding” we never quite reach as we constantly re-evaluate what we are seeing within each image as our view shifts and changes both in light of our emotional state / mental processes and in reaction to reading the text accompanying each piece.
And it is in the textual excerpts that Scylla again teases; whilst they might almost illuminate an image in terms of a single point of understanding, so do they also open doors on to new avenues – or corridors, as Scylla puts it – of thinking and reaction, which can themselves subdivide further than further the more we dwell on what the text might say / mean and what might have motivated its selection.
This makes Almost wonderfully subjective – perhaps “personal” might be a better term; there is no single “given” within any single image or its text. Instead there are layers of potential that might be peeled away as each piece and its companion words are examined and considered, very much informed by the feelings and thoughts we bring to them as much as by the scenes they capture. A magnificent and deeply engaging series rich in interpretation from one of Second Life’s most engaging photographic artists.
SLurl Details
- IMAGO Art Galleries (Androviel, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 