There is something oddly serendipitous (or at least, curiously reflective) in receiving and invitation from Mareea Farrasco to attend a new exhibition of art by Scylla Rhiadra, which opened on January 5th, 2024 at her IMAGOLand Art Galleries. I say this because Containers in some ways encapsulates a subject of which I’ve been very much focused upon in my physical world for the last few months as a project to completely refurbish the house insides and out continues: the Ying / Yang relationship between who we are in life, and the spaces we inhabit.
As Scylla notes in her introduction to the exhibition, the spaces we occupy, be they at home or at work or somewhere between, whether public or private, can both help organise and protect us as individuals whilst also giving us the freedom to fully express who we are, whilst at the same time they can also inform, contain, and constrain us in how we reveal ourselves to the world at large – and perhaps actually to ourselves as well.
At a metaphysical level, no-one is truly an “individual”; we are all (and here, having raised the subject of metaphysics, I’m going to horribly mangle perdurantism and endurantism, simply because the “truth” likely encompasses elements of both even though they are treated as rivals) all collections of experiences and reactions, and of growth and change through time and events.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain this is to take an obvious set of examples: how we project ourselves at work is not how we project ourselves at home; how we face the world when attending a religious service is not the same as when we are joining with like-minded supporters at a sporting event; how we behave within a crowd is generally not the same as when socialising with a smaller, closer group of friends. Of course, how we project ourselves in each of these circumstances is in part the result of accepted social frameworks – when at work, it is expected that we are “professional”; when attending a place of worship, we are expected to exhibit some degree of piety; and so on.
However, it cannot be denied that how we slip between these different personas is also driven by the spaces we have created in order to engage in these activities. For example, a building of worship both naturally constrains our behaviour even before we have entered it; the structure itself demands a more pious behaviour as we approach it; similarly, entering a place of work requires we become “professional” in outlook and attitude. Even at home, the spaces we build so easily inform us as much as we have sought to inform them through the choices we have made in terms of our choices in their décor, the placement of furniture within them, and the “rules” society has placed around them.
This is where Containers stuck that serendipitous / reflective cord within me. For the last few months I’ve been very engaged in a complete re-vamp of the place where I both live and work within the physical world; the work is far from over (and in places hasn’t entirely gone as planned!) but it encompasses everything from general room redecoration through the complete refurbishment of entire rooms – including the remove of walls, the shifting of doorways, the use of lighting, and much more.
Throughout all of it, I’ve become increasingly aware of that Ying/Ying nature in how we express ourselves at home through the décor we chose for the rooms, etc., and how the rooms actually shape – and go as far as to confine our thinking in terms of how we can / should express ourselves through them. That awareness has actually done a lot to alter thinking on how some of the rooms in the house should actually be refurbished such that their use need not be so constrained by convention or how it impacts upon thinking.
Within Containers, and with a lot more subtlety that I’ve used here, Scylla explores the idea of how rooms both express and constrain, not only using images but – as is becoming her trademark – through the use of considered quotes (which also, perhaps, reveal more about her – they certainly further encourage a sense of kinship I hold towards her (and which itself is rooted in multiple facets of her personality she has expressed both through SL and other mediums we share). Together, each image and its accompanying text offer a rich, contemplative exploration of our relationship with the spaces / structures we create (an exploration in which doorways and windows play as much a role as the rooms themselves, offering as they do both suggestions of escape and (as I noted somewhat differently above) the coming constrains a space might try to impose.
Whether drawing us together or as a means to provide separation (be it “personal space” or in some other form), the rooms and spaces – the containers – we create have a power to be an extension of who we are, both in terms of the freedoms of expression they allow and the constraints they demand.
SLurl Details
- IMAGOLand Art Galleries (Rising Phoenix, rated Moderate)
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 