Joanna Kitten (Joaannna) makes a fourth – and welcome – return to Nitroglobus Roof Gallery, curated and operated by the talented Dido Haas, with an exhibition to see out the year.
It was at Nitroglobus that I first encountered Kitten’s work in a dedicated exhibition, and I was immediately captivated by her work. Until that point, she’d largely focused on landscape images; but with Noir, featured at Nitroglobus in October 2022, she moved towards more avatar-centric and narrative collections, often presented in monochrome, as was also witnessed by her second and third exhibitions at Nitroglobus: Fourth Wall in July 2023 and Nude in January 2025.
All three of these past exhibitions were engaging in the way in which they offered a narrative flow; one that was not necessarily linear in nature, but which nevertheless offered insights into a world both built by Joanna and somewhat reflective of her own as she lives it in SL. With Asphalt World, which opened at Nitroglobus on November 15th, 2025, Joanna continues this interweaving of narrative, imagination and images whilst adding a fourth strand: music:
Anyone familiar with my Flickr feed will know that music plays a big part in my creative process. One of my favourite bands is Suede, formed in the 1990s and credited with kick-starting the Britpop movement in the UK. They may be less well known than their more famous contemporaries, Oasis, but they have infinitely more depth.
In 1994, Suede released their album Dog Man Star, which features the song The Asphalt World—a track that, for me, evokes the vision of a dark, gritty cityscape. … This is the world I aimed to create in my images—enhanced with a touch of science fiction inspired by novels such as Neuromancer by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
– Joanna Kitten (Joaannna), describing Asphalt World
Thus, within Asphalt World we have a collection monochrome images captured within the region of Voodoo Land, a nocturnal urban setting. This forms a perfect backdrop for Joanna to offer her captivating studies, each one of which in turn offers flashes of the song’s lyrics wrapped in a film noir approach and edged with touches of science-fiction.
Given the use of the song as an inspiration for the exhibition, I would strongly recommend listening to it when visiting Asphalt World. This is what I did, and whilst viewing Joanna’s images I was struck by the way the lyrics could flow between them, sometimes a line or two landing in one, only to drift away and land on another, to be replaced by a different line. Thus, Asphalt World became even more enticing fluid as a narrative in my eyes.
Another aspect of the images I appreciated – which might be accidental, to be sure, is the way several of the sculptures places across the gallery floor resonate with the song’s lyrics. Sisyphus, for example, with its representation of the hopeless act of pushing a rock uphill whilst knowing it will only tumble back own, seems to embody the song’s central hopelessness in trying to discern what goes on in the head and life of the featured girl when she is out of the lyricis’s sight – and control. Similarly, Easy Murdering perhaps offers a (very viscerally, admittedly) twist on how it feels when the sex turns cruel, and leads to a broken heart.
In all, Asphalt World is richly engaging in and of itself; a clear demonstration of Joanna’s skill and growth as an artist-photographer, elegantly framed within Nitroglobus.
SLurl Details
- Nitroglobus Roof Gallery (Sunshine Homestead, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 