Category: Art in Second Life

Currently open through to mid-August 2022 at ArtCare Gallery, curated by Carelyna, is Formless, a collection of 24 monochrome collages by Traci Ultsch, built using photographs and paintings, some or all of which might just be unfinished – hence the title: Formless.

Traci is typically self-effacing about the art on show, stating:

This exhibit follows on from the ‘Crash’ and ‘Overdose’ works from 2021 in being concerned with more personal subjects, this one specifically dealing with more recent events … They are not what they are. Or maybe they are, who am I to tell anyone what to think about any of this. Maybe it’s just a self indulgent ego driven attempt at getting attention in some over dramatic way.

For those who may not have witnessed either Overdose (reviewed here) or Crash (reviewed here) these were very personal pieces (Overdose dealing with the two faces of addiction, Crash a exploration of the nature of art and its relationship with both the artist and the observer); heady and rich subjects for exploration. Here, the pieces are – on the surface – more esoteric in nature; but they are far from being merely an attempt to gain attention, offering as they do a richness of expression and reflection on the likes of life, love, human nature, age, and relationships.

To start with, let’s take the manner in which they images have been set out; a huge amount of consideration has been given to theme, point and counter-point. Grouped into sets of three, each set with its own collective title. These triplets have then bee set out in pairs, two sets of three per wall, each pairing linked by their respective titles, which offer a mix of counter-point to one another (e.g. Just Like Heaven / Just Like Nothing) or a continuation of a central idea (e.g. Don’t Wake Me Up / I’m Dreaming of You).

Within the individual sets of three is a richness of metaphor that helps direct one to thoughts on the ideas of love and life, age, relationships, and so on. Some of these are richly expressive in their simplicity of approach, yet deeply layered in potential meaning.

The left and centre pictures within I Wish You Were Dead, for example, with the twisted shape (shrivelled leaf? slug?) offer both an evocation of the central wish in the most visceral of ways (assuming the object is a slug), and also – with it’s shape mindful of female genitalia – a cruel twist on the wish focused on barrenness / loss of sexuality.

However, there is a risk that in saying this much, I an artificially constructing a framework around these pieces outside of the artist’s core intent – which may equally be to offer a series of pieces we can chose to interpret through the lens of our own life experience and the events that have most recently affected us. As such, I’ll close my ramblings here and encourage you to visit formless via the SLurl below.

SLurl Details

• ArtCare Gallery (Melody Valley, rated Moderate)

Abyss Artful is one of Second Life’s foremost avatar photographers, with pieces so highly regarded they have been used in the promotion of events such as SL19B. Her work – available on Flickr – centres on sci-fi /cyberpunk and fantasy, although not necessarily exclusively so, and all of which are rich in narrative.

Given Abyss has been active in Second Life for 13+ years, and has a deserved reputation for her work, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that Abyssal 1, currently on display at the Into The Future gallery at the Kondor Arts Centre, is the first exhibition of her work Abyss has mounted in-world.

Some 30 pieces are presented across the gallery, from the lower flower through the mezzanine catwalk to the roof. They may not have been produced specifically for this exhibition  – but this does not meant there are any the less for being seen. Rather the reverse, in fact, as the selection offered brings home the sheer richness of expression and story Abyss puts into her work.

These are genuinely pieces that do not require extended exposition on my part; each one marvellously speaks for itself. So, this being the case, I’m going to shut up and encourage you to go see for yourselves!

SLurl Details

• Into the Future Gallery, Kondor Art Centre (Waka, rated Moderate)

Two immersive exhibitions are awaiting discovery at the Love&Love Factory Art Gallery that are well worth visiting by anyone who appreciates art with a message and a story in Second Life, produced as they are by two artists skilled in the art of narrative presentation.

Before getting into details, these are two installations that should be experienced with the following enabled in the viewer:

• Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) – Preferences → Graphics → make sure Advanced Lighting Model enabled. Note that you do not need to have Shadows enabled (should ALM activate them) – while projectors are used, it is sufficient to just have ALM enabled to see them in action, so Shadows can be safely disabled via the drop-down to improve performance.
• Shared Environment should be used for best viewing of both installations (World → Environment → make sure Use Shared Environment is checked.

The first of the pairing – and I use that term loosely, as these are very much individual installations is The Melt by London Junkers.

This is a single, magnificent sculpture, framed by a poem – also called The Melt – set within an environment suggestive of the sea and under a night sky, both of which evoke a sense of age. The centrepiece might be an iceberg or the face of a glacier; cold and blue, it seems timeless – but pieces have clearly broken away and are caught mid-fall, hinting at the actual state of things – the vast piece is in fact melting and breaking, caught in a continuous state of flux.

It is a state of flux mirrored by the poem itself. Outside of the skeleton of the long-dead great whale, details might not be immediately apparent – but look closely and you might start to make out features: the suggestion of a broken nose here, the outside of an eye, the drop of icy tears.

What do we make of this? To me, The Melt sits as a commentary on the existential threat of global warming; of all we stand to lose if the required actions needed to curb our own massive contribution to the increasing rate of climate change are not taken: that the loss of the glaciers and ice caps is but the precursor to the loss of all life itself, as symbolised by the whale skeleton and the bones of human at the foot of the sculpture.

Meanwhile, Selen Minotaur presents H, a multi-media immersive piece offering its own statement of life – both physical and virtual. Within it, we follow the story of “H”; a neutral character whose very initial suggests either male “H(im)” and female “H(er)”, and their travel through life, told in part through local chat and through our following the path through a “maze” which eventually leads to a series of rooms – or rather, boxes.

Once upon a time…H. Since H was born, H loved boxes. H started to build some as soon as H was able to. So H was sleeping in a box, H was eating in a box, H was working in a box, H was shopping in different boxes. When H wanted to have fun, H was visiting dedicated boxes: one to meet friends, one to dance, one to listen to music, one to watch a show, and so on. Even after death, H planned to be laid down and locked in a box. Isn’t this weird?…

Again, the core theme is clear; through the maze, we follow H as they try to make sense of life; then through the various rooms (be sure to accept the Experience when prompted at the end of the maze by walking into the sign, and then walk into the additional signs to be auto-TP’d between rooms).

Within these rooms we witness the places and activities H users to define their life – be sure to sit on objects, click walls to activate media, etc). However, this is not intended to be purely a means to put us on the strange journey of someone called “H”; rather it is a reflection how we all increasingly live our lives; reliant as we increasingly are on the role of “boxes” – devices, electronics, apps (including Second Life, where we spend all our time in “boxes” – regions), and so on for our sense of connection and engagement. That despite all the so-called promise of a “connected world” offered by the Internet, the web, and – as the hype would have it – “the metaverse”, we are perhaps becoming more an more insular in our search for “meaning” (or at least engagement) in life.

Both H and The Melt are marvellously expressive and deeply layered in the potential for interpretation and consideration.

SLurl Details

Incanto is rated Adult

• Love&Love Factory Art Gallery main landing (use the teleport disk to reach installations)
• The Melt direct SLurl
• H direct Surl

A while ago, I was invited to display a selection of my blog images of the places I’ve written about at the NovaOwl gallery. For various reasons, I couldn’t make the dates initially offered, so things were re-scheduled for July 2022.

The exhibition – which I opted to call Fifty Shades of Pey in an entirely tongue-in-cheek moment – had a “soft” opening on July 3rd within the ground-level exhibition space at the gallery, and at 12:00 noon on Wednesday, July 13th the exhibition will have a more “formal” opening with music by Dj Uli, and I’d like to invite you to come along if you happen to be free, while the exhibition will be open through to July 29th.

I’d also like to thank Owl, Ceakay and Uli for the invitation to some my work, and for Owl for her promotion and support of Fifty Shades, as well as he continued and unstinting work in supporting art and music across Second Life.

SLURL DETAILS

• NovaOwl Gallery (Novatron, rated General)

Art is a powerful tool, offering as it dos the ability for many things from extraordinary creativity, self-expression through to hard-hitting social and political commentary. In this latter regard, art has the ability to prick our conscience and force us, often quite unexpectedly, to confront thoughts and reactions we might otherwise want to try to avoid -and it can also of a means to express pent-up feelings and work through concern and fears. It can thus be both challenging for the audience  and cathartic for the artist.

Such is the case with America The Crumbling, an exhibition of visually stunning and socially expressive paintings by Chuck Clip, which opened on July 7th, 2022 at the Kondor Arts Centre, operated and curated by Hermes Kondor. Chuck has, in recent years, perhaps been best known for hosting and promoting art in Second Life through his Sinful Retreat regions or for providing music and entertainment as DJ Matrix. However, he is also a 2D and 3D artist, and with America The Crumbling he returns to theme exhibitions of his own work in-world for the first time in eight years.

Described as being intended to “shine a light on society in America” that is “colourful, disturbing, maybe even offensive”, America The Crumbling tackles head-on the rising threats to democracy and personal freedoms that are being witnessed both in America and around the world, in paintings that are intensely evocative and a veritable tour de force of an artist’s ability to convey thoughts and feelings through the curation of a specific approach to his paintings and the use of a thematic palette (notably the use of red, white and blue both as colours and tones) to convey his sentiments.

From the militarization of the police (which is actually the root concern of the Defund the Police movement, rather than an outright attempt to strip police forces of their abilities to perform their core functions, as some pundits would like people to believe), through the wholesale assault on democracy (most visibly the attempted January 6th, 2020, insurrection in the United States and also the war in the Ukraine), to the more “subtle” attacks on rights and freedoms such as the persistent assault on social care in the US and the erosion of the traditional barrier between church and state that has allowed a radical religious right to embark on what could well become a wholesale assault on the individual rights of those they deem as undeserving of such rights.

As the introductory notes point out, some of these paintings could well outrage some – but I would suspect those who do react so might not full appreciate the existential tripartite threat the American Experiment currently faces politically, religiously and even through its own judicial system.

For my part, I can only admire Chuck’s ability to challenge and evoke through images that are first and foremost expressions of art, and which do not, for the most part, belabour their point, but work far more subtly: Liberty on her sick bed; the splash of yellow in an otherwise monochrome piece that points to the source of the referenced “Evil”, and so on. Which is not to say Chuck has tried to wrap his comments in a “softness” of presentation: his pieces on the state of US policing pull no punches, whilst And the Magats’ Red Glare… carries an emotional power that can result in the sting of tears being felt behind the eyes.

Richly presented and layered, America The Crumbling is a genuinely startling and evocative presentation and not one to be missed.

SLurl Details

• America The Crumbling, Kondor Art Centre (Waka, rated Moderate)