Category: Art in Second Life

Retrospective is the title of a new exhibition curated by Owl Braveheart, one of the powerhouses behind the FIAT (FIne ArT) project in Second Life. It features the work of Giovanna Cerise, presenting – as the name suggests – a retrospective of her art from the period 2009 (shortly after her arrival in SL at the end of 2008) through until the end of 2014.

On arrival, follow the arrows into the gallery building and through a miniature excerpt from Chaos, Kosmos, her installation at the LEA which form a part of the 7th round of the Artist In Residence (AIR) series there, and which I wrote about in both November and December 2014.

Like Chaos, Kosmos, many of Giovanna’s more recent works have been on a region-wide scale, so the core of the exhibition focuses on her work from the period 2009-2011. Which is not to say elements from her larger builds cannot be found here. For example, Circe, from the magnificent Il Folle Volo (which I reviewed in August 2014), can be found here, waiting, perhaps, to trick visitors into drinking her potion as she once did with Odysseus’ crew.

Many of the pieces within this exhibition demonstrate Giovanna’s eye for fusing movement, colour, geometry and both 2D and 3D elements into quite striking pieces, so much so that still images really don’t capture the motion and interplay of colour and space found in many of them, such as with Lampo, Change Ball, Optical illusion and Optical Illusion 3, which can all be seen at the top of this piece, and which collectively date from 2010.

Also, and with respect to the degree of motion evident in many of the pieces on display, I would suggest that those on older hardware or with older GPUs and who generally have Shadows enabled might want to turn them (or ALM off) in order to fully appreciated the sheer fluidity of movement that is on display.

Offered with an environment that is itself quite striking and which is lit in a manner which ideally complements the pieces on display, Retrospective makes for a delightful and worthwhile visit, and will remain open through until the end of February.

Oh, and should you find yourself arriving at the ground level in the region, take the teleport disc at the landing point to reach the exhibition sky platform, then take the steps up to the exhibition entrance.

Related Links

• Retrospective gallery SLurl (Rated: Adult)

Sina Souza’s newest exhibition, simply entitled Sina Souza opened at the Influence Photography Studio, on Sunday January 25th.

Occupying both floors of the brick-built studio, a part of the Influence Art Gallery Community run by MacKena Soothsayer and Yvan Slade, the exhibition features works by Sina which may well have been seen at other exhibitions of her work – but this doesn’t make them any the less powerful or reduce their emotional impact in any way.

Involved in Second Life since 2012, Sina has had her pieces exhibited widely since then, and has worked in collaboration with other artists such as Bryn Oh and Sabbian Paine. Her work is largely focused on life studies, and sometimes touches on matters of identity. All of her work is shot in Second Life, with PhotoShop used to created the finished pieces.

As noted above, there is an emotional depth to Sina’s work which can be challenging – or at least thought provoking in sentiment, something which tends to draw me all the more to it. I’ve included two particular examples of the power of her work to evoking feelings: Remember Me speaks powerfully of a lost love or kinship; the loneliness felt on the departure of one held dear, and the longing that they may still remember; and In the Crosshair of a Nation, which may not make entirely comfortable viewing, but also carries with it a powerful message of perception.

While not deliberately intended to be a retrospective, the exhibition at Influence does come somewhat close to being so, even if only very informally. Certainly, if you haven’t encountered her work before it serves and an excellent introduction, with the studio space serving as the ideal environment in which to gain an better acquaintance.

Recommended.

Related Links

• Influence Photography Studio (Rated: Adult)
• Mind Factory – Sina Souza’s website

Now open at the art region of MetaLES, is Moya’s Memory, featuring some of the work of French artist Patrick Moya, aka Moya Janus in Second Life.

For those unfamiliar with either name, Patrick Moya is a part of the Nice contemporary art movement, centred on the École de Nice, and he has had a long association with integrating / leveraging technology with and for his art.  Within SL his is perhaps best known for Moya Land, his four-region estate dedicated to his work and to “brand Moya”.

 

The installation at MetaLES is a celebration of Moya’s work, featuring several of his iconic pieces, including a plethora of his cartoon alter-ego.  Central to the piece is a large logic circuit, complete with resistors, transistors,  DIMM modules and so on, within an around which can be found elements of his art – his aforementioned cartoon alter-ego (as well as his superhero identity) and characters from a number of his pieces and drawings while bespectacled orbs carry the likeness of his face and his name can be encountered again and again.

Given its title, this is an installation that appears to work on several levels. First, and perhaps most obviously, it might be seen as something of a personal retrospective by the artist. Secondly, the use of the circuit board stands an an echo of the manner in which moya embraces the use of technology in his art. Thirdly, the circuit board is itself suggestive of memory – and by extension, the mind – further suggesting that the growth of free artistic expression can oft arise from the ordered (dare I say logical) workings of the human mind.

There’s also, perhaps a small comment on the how the identity of the artist is invested in his or her work; the motifs seen throughout this pieces – particularly the frequent use of his name and the self images or the frequent appearance of Dolly the Sheep, be they taken from the physical world or embodied in the use of Moya’s alter-egos – are far less any form of ego-driven statement, and more a commentary on how the artist is himself perhaps defined by his work.

The motif of mind and art being bound through memory and brain is also repeated elsewhere through the installation, such as in the inclusion of a model of Moya’s physical house, or the model of his cartoon alter-ego, from the head of which bursts forth a fountain of the artist’s drawings.

Moya is a prolific artist, whose work covers multiple mediums and formats; as such, there is perhaps another aspect to any interpretation of this installation: that it is itself a small reflection – an aide memoire, as it were – to the vast catalogue of his work, physical and virtual. The latter aspects can, following a visit to MetaLES be enjoyed through a hop over to Moya Land. In the meantime, Moya’s Memory will be open through until at least the end of February, I believe – so enjoy!

Related links

• Moya’s Memory, MetaLES (Rated: Moderate)

 

 

 

Resilience is that ineffable quality that allow some people to be knocked down by life and to come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes.

Resilience. The capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress.

With these two dictionary definitions, one is welcome to ReZilience, the latest quarterly exhibition at Kate Bergdorf’s cosy Berg gallery, located overhead of her home region, Nordan om Jorden.

Both of these definitions can be applied to those of us who use Second Life; the first being applicable when Things Go Wrong for often inexplicable reasons, while the second is more directly applicable to our avatars. While the days of teleporting from A to B and finding shoes, hair, and other attachment trailing from our posteriors as a bizarre tail have long passed, for those who wear mesh, life can be full of random bodily and clothing malfunctions which we stalwartly accept because “it’s Second Life”. And thus the theme of the exhibition is set.

ReZilience is a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek look at what can unexpectedly happen when we log-in to SL, only to find our mesh body rotated 90 degrees and lying horizontally through our (alpha wearing) form, or when we teleport somewhere, only to appear to others as if our heads and bodies are going through a trial separation from one another, and so on.

Tutsy Navarathna, perhaps best know for his marvellous award-winning machinima, is the artist behind the pieces on display,  and he presents a series of pieces combining images captured in-world with paintings and drawing to offers a series of delightful shots celebrating bodily mishaps in Second Life, each with its own delightful caption edged with a wicked sense of humour and, in places, underlined with what might a a subtle social comment on matters of identity – such as appears to be the case with Elle n’a jamais cache utiliser la chirurgie esthetique pour conserver une plastique de reve

With just twelve pieces on display, this is not an extensive exhibit, but it doesn’t have to be; the wry humour is more than adequately presented, and the intimate space provided by Kate’s little gallery space is the ideal environment in which to present the pieces. Rezilience will remain open to visitors through until March 31st, 2015.

Related Links

• Berg Gallery SLurl (Rated: Moderate)