Jules Neville (Jules Catlyn), co-owner of Andante Gallery along with Iris Okiddo (IrisSweet), invited me to visit their latest exhibition, featuring the work of Burleh Leonard, entitled Liquid Landscapes.
Until this exhibition, I hadn’t come across Burleh’s work, and having now visited, I have to say I’ve been missing out. His work is predominantly focused on Second Life landscapes, offering unique and captivating views of the diversity and beauty of SL locations, touched with the use of preferred EEP settings / post-processing techniques.
This is very much the case with Liquid Landscapes, a curated series of Burleh’s work. Across 19 images, he takes us on a tour of some of Second Life’s public spaces, capturing them through the lens of his camera and the eye of his imagination to present views that offer their subjects in the richest of colours through to the clarity of monochrome.
Each image invites the eye to admire and entices the eye to visit its subject. In this, it is a pity SLurls to all of the locations are not included with the pictures (something many of us are guilty of when exhibiting our work!). However, SLurls can be obtained through Burleh’s Flickr stream, from which the images are drawn, for those wishing to visit any given location (the sometimes transient nature of SL locations allowing!).
These very much are images by a photographer-artist exceptionally comfortable with both his subjects and the tools at his disposal, allowing him to frame moments in time and places with which we might well be familiar, in a manner that might well be very different to how they appear to the naked eye on visiting them. However, all of them nevertheless capture the spirit of their subjects and entice us to look at them anew.
In all, a superb exhibition well suited to Andante’s modest size and layout (utilising mirrored copies of the excellent Apple Fall Country Hall (a building I’ve in the past similarly modified to create a comfortable home), which allows art to be displayed in a manner that naturally encourages time to be spent with each image and without any single piece feeling like it is being crowded out by those around it demanding their share of our attention at the same time.
SLurl Details
- Andante Gallery (Amityville, rated Adult)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 