It was back to Nitroglobus Roof Gallery for me of late, to catch the September 2025 Main Hall exhibition. I was keen to do so as Nitroglobus owner and curator, Dido Haas, has invited Catherine Nikolaidis to display more of her art.
I’ve touched on Catherine’s SL-based photography on several occasions in these pages. Working predominantly in monochrome with a focus on avatar studies, she has a gift for framing her work as much a photo-essays in reflection of mood, emotion, beauty, vulnerability, and life. Her skill lay not only in the technicalities of composition, framing, processing, cropping, and so on, but in inhabiting her images with a depth of life and subtle detail rich in the power of communication.
This was very much brought home to me some two years ago, when I was able to catch two overlapping solo exhibitions by Catherine, hosted at Frank Atisso’s Artsville Gallery and at the Kondor Art Centre (see: Catherine’s black and white photography in Second Life), and it is further underlined within this Nitroglobus exhibition, which Catherine has called Skin like Syntax. The easiest way to describe this exhibition is to use Catherine’s own words.
Skin like Syntax explores woman and her body as a living language. In monochrome tones, I capture shifting moods and the balance between softness and strength, intimacy and distance.
Through my lens, real life turns into visual poetry, where light, shadow, and emotion blend together.
– Catherine Nikolaidis
The result is a stunning collection of images rich in context, subtle in narrative and utterly captivating in form and presentation. Within each of them is a story – or perhaps a poem might be a better term, given Catherine’s description – waiting to be told. In fact, such is the richness of expression to be found in each piece that offering words here is somewhat superfluous – and would merely be subjective on my part.
As such, I will close here, and leave it to you to visit Skin like Syntax and allow Catherine’s unique voice to speak to you.
SLurl Details
- Nitroglobus Roof Gallery (Sunshine Homestead, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 