Category: Art in Second Life

I recently wrote about Gem Preiz’s new exhibition Geometry and Genesis , which forms one of the exhibits in this year’s Fine Arts Tour (FIAT) on display at the Galeria Mexico during the month of September.

Also participating in this year’s Tour is another artist friend of mine, Derry McMahon. As the founder (now retired) of the Seanchai Library in SL, Derry has taken as the theme for her exhibit none other than Miguel de Cervantes’ much-loved literary hero, the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha himself, Don Quixote.

We’re all familiar with the tale of this stranger in a strange land, on his quest to make the world a better place, and who sees the world not as it is, but as it should be. A tale which, as Derry noted to me in discussing her exhibit, a perfect foil to explore Second Life from the perspective of both imagination and the many ways in which we create and show our own visions of this strange and beautiful digital land.

In presenting Don Quixote, Derry effectively takes on the role of  visual chronicler to Alonso Quijano’s explorations through Second Life. She presents this idea very cleverly through one of the images in the exhibition, where she can be seen kneeling to photograph the Don, who appears none too certain about having his image captured.

This is a charming and whimsical display of some 28 images captured from around SL and spread over two floors of exhibition space. Some of them feature motifs drawn from Don Quixote’s adventures – there are a few windmills to be found, together with a tavern scene, horses and jousting lances. Others are far more reflective of the stranger in a strange land element, and will likely raise a bemused eyebrow – as they probably did for the Don himself!

The whimsy is evident in images of the Don sitting outside on a caravan, guitar by his side as if awaiting to be called up to a stage and perform – itself perhaps a subtle reference to The Man of LaMancha musical. Then there is the wonderful image of the Don astride a mechanical rodeo horse – a tilting of an entirely different kind!

Derry mixes her art with images of posters from the Wasserman / Darion musical The Man of La Mancha (itself an adaptation of a teleplay by Wasserman) and which was in turn adapted into the 1972 Arthur Miller film starring Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren, which also appears in poster form.  Excerpts from the sheet music give further ambience to the exhibit.

All told, Don Quixote is a delightful display, the images fresh and imaginative and which easily put one in mind of some of the memorable songs from the musical. When touring FIAT, be sure not to miss it.

And on the subject of songs from the musical, there really is only one way to close this piece – and that’s with the marvellous Scott Bakula performing a medley from the musical.

Related links

• Don Quixote by Derry McMahon
• Galeria Mexico landing point (Rated: Moderate)

La Città Perduta (The Lost Town), the arts venue curated by Akilae Gant and Sivi Kelberry, and which is modelled after a run-down Italian town, is currently home to a marvellous installation by Giovanna Cerise entitled Il Folle Volo, or The Mad Flight, which opened on Thursday, October 28th.

The exhibit takes as its central theme Odysseus‘ journey home to Ithaca, as told in Homer’s Odyssey, although it also touches upon his role in the Trojan War, as told through the pages of the Iliad, and takes its name not from Homer’s work, but draws it from Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, although even within this, there remains an echo of Odyssey.

Three of the pieces on display are hard to miss, as they tower over the The Lost Town. In the main piazza, close to the landing point, a great, multifaceted horse rears into the air – a reference to the Trojan War, and Odysseus’ role within it, the stone of the piazza beneath it symbolically stained blood-red.

Close to the town’s church stands the imposing figure of the cyclops Polyphemus, whom Odysseus and his crew encounter after being blown far off course in a storm while attempting to return home following the war. The imposing figure, as tall as the church itself, is made of multiple, shard-like pieces both light and dark, which give it a magnificent dynamic feel.

On the edge of the region sits the titular piece, Il Folle Vollo, drawn from  Dante’s Canto XXVI, and seen in part at the top of this article. The Canto tells of Dante’s journey through the eighth circle of hell, Fraud, where he and Virgil, his guide, encounter Odysseus alongside Diomedes, both caught within flames in the eighth Bolgia, their punishment for perpetrating the deceit of the Trojan Horse. Here Odysseus tells Dante of his final adventures (Dante’s own creation), in which he met his end in a great vortex.

Here, the vortex itself is represented by a swirling mass of prim-like cubes, each rotating on its own, giving rise to a shifting pattern of light and dark as the mass spins about a central axis, and through which faces rise and fall. This piece also has echoes of Odysseus’ encounter with another vortex, that of Charybdis, the great whirlpool, which Odysseus faced along with the six-headed monster, Scylla, while attempting to reach Ithaca.

The final two elements in the piece, which represent Odysseus’ encounters with Circe and with the Sirens, are more subtle in nature. C  in particular make take a little finding – although the teleport disks located close to each piece should help those who want to visit each element of the installation directly rather then exploring the town.

Part of the beauty of this installation is the manner in which each of the pieces is perfectly suited to the environment in which it sits; the blending between them and the default windlight over The Lost Town and the architecture of the town itself, is superb. The multifaceted nature of the pieces not only aid in creating this blending of art and setting, but it also reflects the fact the Odysseus’ legend is also one of many literary facets, both in terms of the telling of the encounters within it, and in the manner in which they are portrayed by Virgil, Homer, Dante, and others down through time.

This multifaceted symbolism is reflected – and extended – in Giovanna’s own description of the exhibit, in which she says, “The work presented in Lost Town is freely inspired to some events in which the man with the multifaceted appearance will prove its capabilities. Odysseus and his journey becomes the symbol of the journey of all men who refuse to be trapped by dogma ropes, conformism and fear and prefer to go further, risking. Everyone can be a Ulysses, when we are ready to take ‘il folle volo’. Is always right do it?”

For lovers of art and mythology, this is an exhibit that is not to be missed.

Related Links

• Il Folle Volo, La Città Perduta (Rated: Moderate)

Opening in September at the Galeria Mexico is a new exhibition by Gem Preiz, featuring more of his remarkable fractal art. Gem kindly sent me a personal invitation to preview the new exhibition ahead of the opening, and I was only too happy to pop along and take a look.

Geometries – Genesis presents a display of two distinct halves bound together by a common theme: humanity’s quests for knowledge and understanding, and where it might eventually lead us.

The first part of the display – Geometries – presents seven pieces of Gem’s art which all of a distinctly linear composition, and which are presented in a white room. Each piece of art is governed by Euclidian rules, such that, as Gem describes them, “the parallel lines join only in the infinity and where the shortest way between two points is the straight line.”

Even without this description, the depth of perspective within each of the pieces on display is clear; one is not so much looking at them as looking into them. It is as if each one is a window looking out over a vista of light and colour; a feeling heightened by some of the pieces having echoes of architecture about them, as if one is looking down upon futuristic high-rise buildings while passing overhead.

Not that the pieces are intended to represent buildings; rather they offer the infinite to us, and as such translate themselves into brightly lit highways stretching off into the future, a window of colour with the promise of knowledge and understanding yet to be found, opening off of the whiteness of all that we have learnt and absorbed to date.

Upstairs, in the second part of the exhibit, we find Genesis, and the differences couldn’t be more apparent. Here, in a blackened room, sit seven more pieces of Gem’s fractal art; these all depicting planets forming against a stellar blanket of stars, sitting under a slowly rotating galaxy, small worlds and Moons painted with images from Google Earth suspended in the spaces between them.

“These pieces,” Gem told me, “evoke the creation mysteries which remain beyond human knowledge, way more complex than our usual geometrical rules.” And they do; each image in this section is deeply evocative. Mathematics and digital processing may have created each of the worlds being formed in the seven paintings, but looking at them, it is hard not to imagine each world cradled in that hands of a Creator, its form being gently shaped and rolled, order emerging from chaos.

The idea of creator runs deeper still. As digital creations, each of these seven worlds has been authored, their creator being the artist himself. Thus the pieces resonate further, the comparisons between the work of the artist and the idea of a creative force behind the very universe itself become interwoven; there is majesty here.

Taken individually, Geometries – Genesis present two remarkable exhibitions of fractal art on their own; together they present a single whole which, while comprising two unique perspectives and styles of painting, are unified in both their form and in their representation of our civilisation-spanning quest to know and to understand, and – as Gem reminds us, the fact that Nature is not so simple to decipher as we may have once thought.

Geometries – Genesis opens on Monday September 1st, and will remain at the Galeria Mexico through until the end of September, alongside a number of other exhibitions hosted at the region-wide gallery as a part of FIAT – the Fine Arts Tour of 2014.

Related Links

• Geometries – Genesis SLurl (Rated: Moderate)
• My reviews of Gem Preiz’s work