Santoshima recently extended a personal invitation to me to view the latest exhibition at her Ribong Gallery. Entitled The Overwhelm, the installation is by Meiló Minotaur, and it presents a layered, animated piece that marks – for me, anyway – the first art installation to use Animesh within its presentation.
This is actually a difficult piece to quantify. In part this is due to the minimalism involved – a series of blocked-out spaces intended to represent a house; it’s also because viewing it, one perhaps gravitates away from the provided description towards an alternative possible interpretation.
The Overwhelm is both a house and a stage, where private life presents itself in its slow, disturbing anguish. This animated installation is about family, and about the overbearing weight of being responsible for a new life, about disconnection, excruciating loneliness, and the shared commonness of this experience.
– CapCat Ragu, explaining the Overwhelm on behalf of Mieló Minotaur
Ribong Gallery: The Overwhelm
The term “new life” suggests this is a piece about the anxiety surrounding a forthcoming birth; the setting suggests something else: the anxiety felt when a child has failed to return home as expected. This interpretation fits the later comment in the description, which defines the colours and tone of the setting as,”distressing mood, with an implication of imminent violence”.
But for me, there is a third interpretation: a couple who have in fact lost their child and are both surrounded by memories of that child in the form of the haunting wall images, and trapped within the simmering tension of loss, blame and recrimination. All of which, wrapped within that sense of grief, is waiting to explode outwards in anger and violence toward whichever of them gives cause through a wrong action or word.
Ribong Gallery: The Overwhelm
The Animesh models give a physical dimension to the atmosphere of anxiety, looming anger, anguish and hurt through their pacing, head movements, and through their shape. The exaggerated points of the male figure’s shoulders convey a sense of hunch-shouldered annoyance as he strides in his place, for example.
Curious, involved, oddly attractive, The Overwhelm is open through to November 2019.
SLurl Details and Related Links
The Overwhelm, Ribong Gallery (Mieum, rated General)
SL Through My Eyes – Jamee Sandalwood; Windlight Gallery, September 2019
SL Through My Eyes is an extensive exhibition of Second Life photography by Jamee Sandalwood that is currently open at the Windlight Gallery, curated by John and Eleseren Brianna. As the title of the exhibition – located on the upper floor of the gallery – implies, this is something of a personal look at Second Life, with Jamee introducing it thus:
This has been three years of inspiration in the making, and I am so proud to share it with you all. I hope you will find something that is special and reminds you of why you are part of this virtual world. SL has so many things to offer with so many talented and amazing people sharing their talents in ways that inspire. Each of these photos was taken as I was inspired by the beauty and creativity of someone who took the time to build something that was beautiful to me.
SL Through My Eyes – Jamee Sandalwood; Windlight Gallery, September 2019
Jamee’s work covers fashion photography, avatar studies, abstracts and – obviously – landscapes. And while the focus of SL Through My Eyes is on the latter, it also touches on her other areas of artistic interest as well. A number of the pieces include self-portraits that also have a slant towards fashion, for example, while a study of a lion’s head is rendered as a painting that, while not abstract in style, has a wonderful sense of abstraction about it which suggests it could have been sculpted and that were one to reach out and touch it, fingers would be able to trace their way over the lines and creases that appear to give form to the fur and mane.
It is this richness of life and presence in Jamee’s work that I find so attractive. Her landscapes in particular always strike me as not just capturing the memory of a location, but its very breath as well.
SL Through My Eyes – Jamee Sandalwood; Windlight Gallery, September 2019
Whereas others tend to post-process to the point that while they have produced a work of art in its own right, they have in doing so perhaps lost the core essence of the place their works features. In her work, Jamee offers a lighter touch, one that still results in expressing her artistic muse and creativity, but which also retains the essence of the place in which the original image was taken.
A further attractiveness with this exhibition is the dressing Jamee has given the gallery space around her work: fantasy settings fronted by night flowers that seem to offer a way into the images; the accoutrements of a beach location accompanying her coastal and water images; ivy hanging from walls to bring together images of ruins and horses to form a vignette of their own. Among these elements are a series of small photos of Jamee and her SL companion, Matt Thomson; these add a further personal dimension to the exhibition that is delightful to see.
SL Through My Eyes – Jamee Sandalwood; Windlight Gallery, September 2019
SL Through My Eyes is an engaging and evocative exhibition of art by an exceptionally talented photographer and artist. I believe it will be open through until the end of September, and a visit is thoroughly recommended.
Angelika Corral and SheldonBR, curators of DaphneArts, have something of an affinity with the work of Edgar Allen Poe. In 2017 they hosted an exhibition of art marking 208th anniversary of his birth, and they have also produced works of their own focused on Poe, notably Dream Within A Dream, based on Poe’s poem A Dream Within A Dream, and a static installation modelled on Fall of the House of Usher.
Dream Within A Dream formed the leaping-off point for a series of immersive installations they have produced (and which has most recently encompassed the works of John Donne – see No man is an island). Now, and with an official public opening on September 2nd, 2019, they have returned once more to Poe, with a new immersive installation Annabel Lee, based on Poe’s poem of the same name.
Annabel Lee was the last poem Poe composed; it explores the themes of death, love and the hereafter – all common these for Poe – wrapped within a “ballad” about the death of a beautiful woman. Within it, the narrator recounts his love for the woman – Annabel Lee – which began many years ago in a “kingdom by the sea”. He believes their love was so intense, the angels themselves became envious to the extent they caused her death. Nevertheless, he believes that the love they shared was so deep, neither angels nor the grave can constrain it, and that their souls remain entwined. And so it is, each night he dreams of her, as he lies beside her tomb.
DaphneArts: Annabel Lee
Like so many of Poe’s poems, Annabel Lee is complex as much as it is dark. There is something of an autobiographical element to it, another facet oft present in Poe’s work. He himself fell in love with his cousin, Virginia Clemm, and in the words of the poem – “she was a child” – being just thirteen when Poe married her, and she died just two years prior to the poem being written. Thus there is an element that in writing about the loss of “Annabel Lee”, Poe is perhaps drawing on personal experience.
In keeping with these immersive environments designed by Sheldon and Angelika, a visit commences in a sky box, where visitors are given an interactive HUD as a temporary attachment, and which should be accepted (it will be automatically be attached, and should detach on leaving – if not, just click the Stop button, when displayed). The skybox also includes instructions on setting your viewer’s environment (if you are using Firestorm, then the local windlight should apply via that viewer’s parcel windlight support). Once the viewer is set in accordance with the recommendations, visitors are free to take the teleport board to the ground level and the installation itself.
DaphneArts: Annabel Lee
The ground level presents the poem through what Sheldon and Angelika call “Magical Realism” – the use of sounds, visuals and the spoken word (in this case, Angelika reading the poem) – to evoke a sense that the visitor is immersed within its unfolding story. It’s a technique that might also be described as “immersive literary allegory”: a visual setting that both directly frames the telling of the poem’s story (the “kingdom by the sea”) and the passing of Annabel Lee (shown through the presence of her tomb), whilst also offering cues to the deep story of love and loss.
This latter aspect is shown through the use of elements such as the candles (a clear symbol associated with death) and the path they mark (representing the path we follow through life to its eventual end, which is in turn symbolised by the tomb), and by the house. The latter (perhaps best explored after hearing the poem throughout), shows signs of past habitation with rooms and furniture slowly mouldering. However, these are themselves more broadly representative of the memories of love and life shared but which have come to an end; the memories we fight to hold on to after the passing of a loved one, but which inevitably age and fade with the passing of time.
DaphneArts: Annabel Lee
So it is that this is a deeply atmospheric and evocative setting; one that should be experienced rather than described. It sets Annabel Lee, the poem, almost as fairytale without in any way destroying or distorting the emotional span of the original.
CybeleMoon (Hana Hoobinoo) is renowned for her fabulous mixed-media art. It carries within it a richness of tone, a mixing and balance of light and shade, a depth of symbolism and – most poignantly – a wonderful framing of narrative that makes any exhibition of her work in Second Life utterly unmissable.
All of this richness, depth and framing is on display in full force at The Itakos Project, curated by Akin Alonzo, where Cybele presents The Stolen Child, a series of 15 images presented within a glade-like setting caught in the enfolding arms of ancient ruins, which has been specially built for the exhibit by Akim. Reached via the teleport door in the main foyer of the gallery, this setting is not merely a backdrop for Cybele’s art, it is part of the overall theme of the exhibition, designed through its form and lighting to increase the feeling of immersion in in the story the exhibition presents.
The Itakos Project, The Stolen Child – CybeleMoon
This story is not offered as a linear tale; rather, there is a central strand of theme running through both setting and images. This strand leads us through Cybele’s images, linking them indirectly and without necessary order (although one is suggested, somewhat by the circular placement of the pieces) as they form windows, if you will, into the underlying proposition of the exhibition; a proposition a proposition Cybele explains thus:
Fairies are not benevolent creatures at all, attracted by the strength and vitality of mankind, they kidnap children and especially newborns, or seduce (for the purpose of kidnapping) beautiful girls and boys.
She continues by noting the myth of the fairy lies routed in a times past need to rationalise the death of a child, be it at birth or with a short span of months or years thereafter: that the fairies had stolen the child away from a otherwise sad destiny. Within this weaving of fable, there was also menace: children with autism, depression, or other mental health issues were at times considered to have lost their souls as a result of eating fairy food.
The Itakos Project, The Stolen Child – CybeleMoon
Thus through Cybele’s art were are presented with a series of poignant scene sit within the framework of the dome of a night’s sky – the time when fairies might be abroad more than during the hours of daylight – and within a symbolic ring of ancient walls and arches. The latter carries with it a echo of the fairy ring of mushrooms that act as doorways to the fairy realms, or the idea of the faery castle hidden from mortal eyes by the form of a hill, and into which abducted children might be taken should they not take care.
That central strand running through the images – and the exhibition as a whole – takes the form of The Stolen Child, written in 1886 by by William Butler Yeats, who was also captivated by the entire mythology of faeries in Irish mythology. Through the words of his poem, we witness the bewitching song of the faerie folk, calling to children, tempting them away…
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The Itakos Project, The Stolen Child – CybeleMoon
Cybele takes lines and words contained within the poem as titles for each of her pieces. Thus, each image forms that window I mentioned above, a glimpse into a scene, one that is often double-edged. On the one hand, it may seem innocent and rich in joy or tranquillity: young folk running through a meadow; a view across rolling hills at twilight while sheep graze; the innocence of blowing into a dandelion. On the other, the titles of the pieces hint at the darker element of fae intent: the stealing away of children, of leaving mothers bereft, to deny the young that chance to see sheep grazing at twilight or know the comforts of home and hearth, their young lives having been swept away with the promise of dances by moonlight in places forbidden by their ever-anxious parents.
To further accompany the exhibition, Cybele also provides a short story, together with additional images, that can be found on her (always enchanting) website. Also presented with the story and images is an audio recording of the marvellous Loreena McKennitt, who put the words of The Stolen Child to music. I’ll leave you with a video of the song from one of Ms. McKennitt’s live performances, and the note that this is a truly engaging and evocative exhibition; rich in narrative and atmosphere, and absolutely not to be missed.
SLurl Details
The Itakos Project (ATL, rated Moderate) – remember to take the teleport door in the gallery’s foyer to reach the exhibition!
The Itakos Project: Soul Portrait Collection Summer Black & White Edition – Saveria Rossini
The Itakos Project, operated and curated by Akim Alonzo, has undergone an expansion since my last visit (see: Soul Portraits in Second Life), with a new halls – the Blue Pavilion – and an extension to the Black Pavilion, as well as a new platform gallery that will officially be opening a new exhibition on August 30th.
The Blue Pavilion sees a follow-on to Soul Portraits linked to above, with Soul Portrait Collection: Summer Black & White Edition. As with the first edition this features images from selected photographers who have submitted their work to the Itakos Project Flickr group. However, as the title implies, this selection features black-and-white images, and which had been submitted by Angelina Corral, Aver Osk, Aimee Cristole, Carolyn Diesel, Gabi Ka, Edie Horngold, Latia Lavecchia, -K- Lynagh, Ktsyakumi Izabela Navarathna, Saveria Rossini and Sunset Theas.
The Itakos Project: Soul Portrait Collection Summer Black & White Edition – Sunset Theas
Further, and in difference to the first edition, the images here are not restricted to head-and-shoulder images; they instead offer broader perspectives – full body shots, those with more of a background in view, and so on.
This, to me, adds a further depth to this black & white edition; the range of images helps to keep things fresh as one moves through the hall, while the broader perspectives evident in some of the images offer a broader canvas on which the imagine can write its own story to accompany each image. Which is not to say those that do offer more direct facial studies are any the less fascinating; quite the reverse in fact. All of the pieces offered here are remarkable for their depth and ability to stir the imagination into framing a story around them.
The extended Black Pavilion offers the second of two exhibitions by Akim that are currently on display at the gallery (the other being The Matrix, which I reviewed here). And I confess from the start that Akim is fast becoming one of my favourite artists in Second Life.
The Itakos Project: Portraits And Some Other Circumstances – Akim Alonzo
In Portraits and some Other Circumstances he presents a series of colour and black and white female avatar studies. Originally displayed in June 2019, the collection has been expanded by Akim, and includes direct portrait studies and a series of “other circumstances”, which present more sensual studies (that feature nudity, and so should be considered NSFW).
These are pieces that again offer scenes suggestive of wider stories. In this, some offer direct hooks to a possible narrative – such as The Model was Impressed by the Old Camera, which places a faceless, naked subject alongside a camera and adds a very subtle twist of double entendre via the title. Others are more subtle, such as Imagine (Looking away), with its suggestion of the things around us we might so easily miss – or the suggestion of things we are never intended to see, but are nevertheless with us – such as angels who watch over us. Throughout all of these pieces there is a subtle use of pose, eye positioning, model placement soft focus, and so on, that gently draw us into each image, asking us not so much to view it, but explore it and consider what might lie beyond each frame.
The Itakos Project: Portraits And Some Other Circumstances – Akim Alonzo
Within the White Pavilion, visitors can find The Edgy World of M, featuring a collection by Maloe Vansant.
In this collection Maloe offers a series of pieces – most of them, I believe, self-studies – designed to tell us about “an unusual and hidden side of her imaginary world.” Most of them are a mix of dark juxtaposed with vivid, rich colour in what is both a powerful contrast and naturally symbiotic balance.
The Itakos Project: The Edgy World of M – Maloe Vansant
This contrast / symbiosis seems to also reflect an underlying narrative with these pictures – each of which might be considered a passage lifted from a story – the colour perhaps representing the “normality” of a life as it is presented to others – a mask if you will; and the black representing what lies hidden behind those same masks of normality: the hidden desires and thoughts – some of which may themselves be dark in nature (the the references to death and the horrors of removing masks).
These various elements come together quite dramatically, drawing us into that edgy world of M, a place that is rich in tone, theme, and image, and which is also at its heart, both personal (on at least two levels – Maloe’s and the observer’s) and intensely primal.
The Itakos Project: The Edgy World of M – Maloe Vansant
Also on display at the time of writing is Simply Dreaming, a further remarkable collection of art by Awesome Fallen, and which I wrote about in April 2019.
Currently on display at Diotima Art Gallery curated by Redi (Red Bikcin), is Hot Summer, an exhibition of art by Kimeu Korg. As the title suggests, it features images – fifteen in total – depicting summertime scenes; or which are for the most part summertime scenes!
I admit to being something of a fan of Kimeu’s art, as he has a wonderful sense of whimsy and also an eye for creating thought-provoking images that can draw upon the abstract and / or the absurd or comical to pull the observer into them. Some of this talent is on display within the pieces presented here, although most are perhaps more “traditional” in nature – albeit with various motifs that also make Kimeu’s work so attractive.
Diotima Art Gallery – Kimeu Korg
The more comical can be seen in the likes of (13), located on the the right of the entry hall of the gallery. It features Kimeu standing on a beach in white, singing lustfully, a microphone in one hand and a rubber chicken held outstretched in the other, it’s beak agape as if singing in accompaniment. Set against a calm sea and sandy foreground – two of the aforementioned motifs that can be found as a theme to many of the pieces here – it cannot fail to raise a smile.
Whimsy is evident front-and centre in some of these pieces – notably in the likes of (8), found in the far corner (relative to the entrance) of the L-shaped gallery, but also far more gently, such as with (4), which at a first casual glance might appear to be an ordinary image of a man standing on that sandy shoreline and looking out over sunny waters to where Orca-like fins rise above the waves, a dog and puppy – until you take a second look, and realise the “dog” and “puppy” are in fact a seal and her pup.
Diotima Art Gallery – Kimeu Korg
Finished as paintings – both oil and watercolour in looks – and also as coloured drawings, Kimeu’s pictures always have a life of their own that is unique within Second Life, something that also increases the appeal of seeing them exhibited, and this collection is no exception. It will remain open through to the end of Thursday, September 5th, and a visit is strongly recommended.
