Ribong Gallery Artspace – Quadrapop Lane: Art is What You Make It
I’m starting this article with an apology for San (Santoshima), curator / owner of Ribong Gallery. In mid-February, she sent me an invite to attend Art is What You Make It, the (at the time) new exhibition by Quadrapop Lane … and I managed to mis-file it in inventory. As a result, I am late getting to it and writing about it – but the exhibition is currently still open and well worth viewing.
The easiest way – to a point – of explaining this installation is to use Quadrapop’s own words:
Art is What You Make It is an installation of art made from other art, starting with textures used on prims, mesh and particles from quad’s RL photos, designs created in photoshop, digital drawings, and quad’s physical drawings and paintings. These images are often recycled through SL screen shots that may further be manipulated and uploaded as textures.
The images have been altered and recycled repeatedly so that their source is often unrecognizable to the maker: Art is built of layers of experience, personal and cultural, built on an artist’s response to the world. The results may bear no resemblance to the initial motivation or concept.
– Quadrapop Lane
Ribong Gallery Artspace – Quadrapop Lane: Art is What You Make It
The result is a walk through 2D and 3D art that is genuinely and stunningly visual. There are elements of animation, abstraction , particle and physical art. To see it at its best, you’ll need a reasonable Draw Distance (96m recommended) and have Advanced Lighting Model (ALM – Preference → Graphics → make sure the option is checked). The installation is divided into six areas – four on the same level, which can be visited in a counter-clockwise direction and end with a surprise (take the angled tunnel).
These four areas include 2D, 3D and animated art pieces by Quadrapop (with the latter including particle emitters). ALM is required as projectors are used throughout, so without the option being enabled, you’ll miss a lot. A spiral ramp rising from the centre on the four rooms, rising to a mezzanine level with further art, including a walk-through element which can be intense in terms of the lighting, and a marvellous 3D animated fresco hanging in space.
Ribong Gallery Artspace – Quadrapop Lane: Art is What You Make It
The remaining level is reached via teleport from the lowest level (look for the TP disk on the four of one of the rooms), and takes the form of a maze-like walk through light to the centre and the TP back to the low level.
Describing all that is here is a little wasted, as this is an entirely visual installation, one fully deserving to to be seen and enjoyed. So I’m going to shut up now and encourage you to visit while there is time enough to enjoy Quadra’s work for yourself.
Ribong Gallery Artspace – Quadrapop Lane: Art is What You Make It
Shangdu, March 2022 – click any image for full size
On Sunday, March 6th, Hera (Zee9) opened a new setting for people to visit and appreciate. Called Shangdu, its name might for some call forth thoughts of the original northern capital of the Yuan dynasty, the successor to the Mongolian Empire as founded by Kublai Khan; a place we in the west perhaps more familiarly know as Xanadu.
However, this build is not in any way reflective of, or inspired by, the words penned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem Kubla Khan, itself the result of an opium-fuelled dream, or anything to do with the city. Whilst fantastical in nature, the poem is nonetheless rooted in descriptions that, passing by way of Samuel Purchas (from whom Coleridge might be said to have gained his opening line for the poem, Purchas having written In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace) all the way to Marco Polo, who did visit the fabled city some time in the late 1270s.
Shangdu, March 2022
Instead, Hera uses the name Shangdu to evoke a sense of the Yuan period, and to evoke a feeling of natural beauty, rather than the artificial opulence born of Coleridge’s poem or Purchas’ words. In fact, what we have here is a painting in 3D, a watercolour we can walk through.
The difference here being the opulence is in natural beauty. I first did this about 20 years back in Unreal Tournament; I was looking for something completely different to create and I found these beautiful paintings of a Chinese water Village. [However,] this is a complete fantasy, I have not tried for any particular accuracy in the buildings, although the textures are all taken directly from photos of the village.
Hera (Zee9)
Shangdu, March 2022
The setting presents a walled village through which narrow canals run to both feed and be fed by a moat that encompasses around two-thirds of the village as its sits beyond the high walls and which is it turn directly fed from falls dropping from the northern-western uplands that cup the remaining corner of the village.
The landing point sits as the exit of a tunnel, a rutted track running from it to curve gently to the only landward gate into the village, presided over by an imposing gatehouse ready to defend the wooden bridge below. The tunnel offers the sense that visitors are travellers – perhaps on the Silk Road and following Marco Polo, even if this is not the Shangdu – coming to this place after a long journey.
Shangdu, March 2022
With watch towers sitting notably on the north and east walls of the settlement, it’s clear where the greatest threat to its security might originate – not that this is a particularly a place of war; far from it in fact: the overall impression is that this is a place that might be linked to fishing for sustenance, given the eastward lake sitting beyond the walls, and where at least one silk trader has established a presence, whilst in another resides an artist. However, outside of these and the local temple and a house, the majority of the building here are façades rather than furnished places.
But having so few interiors to explore in no way detracts from the setting; rather, it helps spur the imagination as to might otherwise lie behind the doors to the houses and other buildings, allowing us to add to Hera’s 3D painting with the colours of our own imaginations. As we wander along the narrow streets, cross the wooden and stone bridges, passing under blossoming trees and by stone seats and wooden benches, it is hard not to imagine the local denizens also passing along the same cobbled ways, the smells and sounds of cooking coming from within different abodes, mixed with the sounds of animals in the little yards and the shouts of merchants and other echoing down the alleyways.
Shangdu, March 2022
For those prepared to look for them – but within the village walls and beyond – lay places to sit and / or mediate. Signalled by the presence of small pillows, some of these are relatively easy to find, but one might require some care spying to locate 🙂 .
Set within its own EEP Day Cycle, as used in the images in this article, and including both an ambient sound scape and an appropriate music streams for those who would care to listen as they explore, Shangdu is another superb design and gift to all of us from Hera. Should you drop in, do please consider making a donation to the heron at the landing point to help Hera with the costs involved in building her creations (again, note that is common for Hera, the buildings to be found within the village are all of her own creation).
There is another world, but it is inside this one.
– Paul Eluard
This is the quote Cica Ghost has selected for the description of her March 2022 installation, Green Planet, which opened on Saturday March 5th. Whilst most quotations give Eluard as saying “in”, rather than “inside”, it is nevertheless an entirely appropriate quote for the installation, and for at least two reasons – which I’ll come to in a moment, and promise not to offer an entire treatise on them!
Follow the SLurl (or the LM, if you have that!), and you’ll be delivered to the bowl of what might be an ancient impact crater, almost completely ringed by green-covered hills. The only way out – worryingly – is a gaping maw overseen by a single large, roving eye, and from within which rise or hang green stalagmites and stalactites – or might they be teeth?!
Cica Ghost: Green Planet
However, the maw is not that deep and is not waiting to chomp down on you when you attempt to pass; rather it is a gateway to a curved gorge-like canyon, its walls and floor again almost slimed in green and from which green flowers point their trumpet-like blooms at the strange orange-green sky.
The far end of this valley opens out into an even more alien landscape, a place inhabited by strange slug-like creatures as green as the their surroundings, some with what we would regard as the normal complement of eyes, others with decidedly monocular vision and still some with no real indication of any form of eye or eyes. Fat-lipped and bulbous-headed, they are clearly not of Earthly origin, and the mix with more of the strange maw-like creatures and one or two that have legs.
Cica Ghost: Green Planet
Throughout this landscape, more of the trumpet-like flowers point to the sky, and many of the undulating features have the feel of having been extruded rather than formed, while green globs drool from fronds and rocks as if someone has thrown green paint across this place – or perhaps it is the gunk thrown out by whatever caused the impact crater that is home to the landing point! Also to be found here are little fumeroles that periodically burp forth green bubbles that drift upwards, while grass-like fronds that have escaped any smothering by the green goop curl gently.
Sitting pristine within the setting is a silvered metal rocket, panels heavily riveted and a single viewport looking out over the scene – but the creature with its face pressed to the thick beaded glass does not appear to be human. The presence of the rocket and its traveller, together with a glass-domed very Earthly-looking flower, add perfectly to the overall surrealism of the setting.
Cica Ghost: Green Planet
And surrealism is one of the reasons the quote Cica has chosen for the setting is so apt: Eluard was one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, dedicated to opening channels in the mind as a means for the unconscious mind to express itself. In this respect, there is much to be said about Second Life and the manner in which we can use it to express ideas of our own and unlock our imaginations in a way that somewhat parallels surrealism’s attempts to unlock the subconscious.
The second element in the fitting choice of Eluard’s quote is that just as there is a myriad of worlds out amongst the stars of our galaxy, some of which – perhaps many – might will harbour strange and exotic life that might be celebrated through the bizarre creatures Cica has given us here; we have only to look inwards to find equally fabulous “other worlds” as they sit within our imaginations. Worlds like Cica’s Green Planet – wonderfully bizarre and captivating, unusual, engaging and fun (be sure to mouse over things – there are hidden dances awaiting discovery and a number of fun poses to be had – although you might have to look up at what is drifting around overhead to find the latter!).
Cica Ghost: Green Planet
As always, another great installation from Cica, who never fails to offer something fresh and eye-catching each month, so do please consider making a donation to her on-going work when visiting! And don’t forget the gift at the landing point!
Bella’s Lullaby, March 2022 – click any image for full size
It was back to Bella’s Lullaby for me recently, after Shawn Shakespeare let me know the setting has a springtime rebuild by holder Bella (BellaSwan Blackheart) – and given its been around 6 months since my last visit and the fact that it has since moved to a new region – it was actually about time I dropped by again!
Bella’s Lullaby has always offered something of an easy, tranquil visit for those dropping in, and this remains the case with the current design. Set beneath a spring sky in which the Sun’s light is enough to wash the off-region islands in a bright haze, yet overcast enough to suggest spring showers might be on the way, the region again offers a pleasing mix of land and water – in this case, two long islands split by an off-centre channel running north-to-south between them, and plenty of open spaces, together with a sprinkling of buildings and structures across both islands.
Bella’s Lullaby, March 2022
With the channel splitting the islands guarded at each end by a tall windmill sitting on its own small island and a squat lighthouse rising from the waters on four sturdy legs respectively, the two large isles are connected by a single low bridge that effectively presents passage along the entire channel by the little boats dotted along its length. Not, given the rocky, shoal-like nature of parts of the channel, that this would necessarily be possible even were it sans a bridge.
The landing point sits within the courtyard of a small café sitting upon the larger island. This is actually one of three brick-built structures on this island; to the south stand a pair of linked shops which some visitors may recognise as also having made an appearance in the previous iteration of Bella’s Lullaby, and which now rise shoulder-to-shoulder from a paved square. Between these shops and café lies the remaining brickwork, a long, tall wall that divides the land between them even whilst it starts and finishes without apparent purpose, a single door set within it.
Bella’s Lullaby, March 2022
A low, capped stone wall runs parallel to the waterway to also help connect shop to café, whilst something of an overgrown garden sitting between the latter and the brick wall also acts to draw café, wall and shops together to complete a vignette awaiting exploration. Surrounding the shops is a degree of urban detritus – a telephone box, vehicles, an aging bus stop and tram sans tracks – that help to give them a further unique sense of presence in this place.
However, these are not the only buildings to be found within the setting. Sitting over the waters of the channel is a wood-built artist’s studio, whilst on the other island sit a wooden barn and a small brick-built cottage with but a single room offering a cosy observation point – although the sign hanging above the door seems to suggest it was going to be something else. Barn and cottage sit at opposite end of their island, a scattering of birch trees and the hints of a once-cobbled path connecting them.
Bella’s Lullaby, March 2022
Throughout the entire sitting there is much attention to detail – such as a robin helping himself to a meal outside the café, the carving of a heron watching the narrow waterway, the cats lazing in the Sun, and so on. There are also multiple places to sit to be found across the landscape, indoors, and out on the water and within some of the vehicles, whilst photographers will doubtless find much to capture and frame as well.
Bella’s region designs never fail to offer something fresh and uplifting to see and appreciate, and this latest iteration of Bella’s Lullaby is no exception. The open landscape that runs over the two main islands gives one a sense of space and peace, the trees and shrubs also presenting a sense of privacy in the way they break-up the low-lying lands, whilst the generally overgrown / unkempt nature of the spaces around the buildings hints at a sense of age / the passing of time.
Bella’s Lullaby, March 2022
This is very much a setting where one can gain a sense of being able to breathe and leave worries and concerns behind, whether one opts to sit quietly or explore and spend time spotting the local birds and the other fowl that make up the majority of the inhabitants.
The question of identity / pseudonymity has been linked to Second Life pretty much since the platform from the start; we have complete agency of how we represent ourselves and how much of ourselves we chose to reveal to the world. It is often said that this pseudonymity allows us to more fully express who we’d like to be.
But who are we, really? The person we are at home and among family is not the same as the person we are at work;, and that person is not the same as the person we are when with friends, and so on. Even within our family group, who we are with loved ones – husband / wife, children, parents – can change from moment to moment.
And all of these personas are very different to who we are when alone; those intimate moments of oneness in which we perhaps most truly reveal who we are without fear of observation / ridicule / rejection. And so, too, are multiple areas of overlap – each and every one of us is an individual; but the question still remains, given all these multiple facets to our make-up, some self-imposed, others placed upon us by society / those around us, who are we – really? And can we use avatars to express not who we’d like to be, but who we are?
Onceagain Art Gallery: Scylla Rhiadra – Intimacy
It is this exploration of self through our avatar that is the focus of Intimacy, an exhibition / installation by Scylla Rhiadra which opened at the end of February 2022 at the Onceagain Art Gallery curated by Onceagain (Manoji Yachvili).
Set within an environment that is as much a part of the exhibition, are twelve images designed to better inform us as to who the person who inhabits “Scylla Rhiadra” actually is. To quote Scylla’s introductory notes from the exhibit:
The pictures in this exhibit represent my attempt to communicate that extra “something” about myself. They do so, not by removing the barriers that separate who I most truly am from how I represent in a virtual environment, but by leveraging virtual images and appearances to convey it … Here you will see “Scylla” (who has never washed a dish in her entire virtual existence) dancing as she washes dishes, getting dressed in the morning, and eating ice cream at outrageous hours of the night. These are intended not merely to provide some insight into “what I do” in real life, but more vitally “who I am” there – which is, pretty closely, also “who I am” in Second Life.
– Scylla Rhiadra
Onceagain Art Gallery: Scylla Rhiadra – Intimacy
Of course, one might say there is a certain hubris in trying to use an avatar in this way; at the end of the day, whatever is done, the avatar is not the person operating it, neither in look nor in perception by others. Plus, said avatar is a puppet; any image of it must posed, the setting staged; thus any attempt to use it to bring forth a broader expression of “self” must itself be something of a manipulation of perception as much as any other use of our avatar to impart a persona.However, this is far from true. While the images may well be constructed to bring forth a specific aspect of our personality, the fact remains that the aforementioned pseudonymity baked-in to Second Life also frees us from the usual impediments (fear, embarrassment, etc), that might otherwise stand in the way of our revealing more of ourselves to strangers never seen or known. Thus, they are the perfect vehicle, staged settings notwithstanding, by which we can “be who we really are” and express what might otherwise remain hidden, as Scylla notes in her introduction to Intimacy:
One of the most important opportunities afforded by Second Life, and virtual embodiment generally is the chance to represent facets of ourselves that we cannot, or do not, express in our material lives. That I am doing something that is really quite the opposite of this – representing my more mundane self virtually – doesn’t change the reality that a virtual self can be not merely liberating but also revelatory. Just as the fictions of a good novel can reveal Truths with greater clarity than more factual forms of discourse, so too, I hope, does my artifice here strip away some of the barriers that separate me from . . . you.
– Scylla Rhiadra
Onceagain Art Gallery: Scylla Rhiadra – Intimacy
Thus, these 12 images are deeply engaging and fascinating in their depictions; so much so, that any thoughts of the “falseness” of their staging / posing is quickly lost. Instead, we are invited to share on the most intimate expressions of how Scylla views herself, and the moments from the physical world that make up many of the facets of who she is in the world of pixels and zeros and ones.
As noted, this is an exhibition in which the setting plays as much as role as the images themselves. From the night sky (make sure you have Use Shared Environment checked via menu → World → Environment), through to the maze, the lamps that illuminate each image as we approach it, to the props to be found throughout the space, everything has a role to play. The maze, for example, might be seen as a metaphor for our exploration of who we are, either as others try to understand us, or as we look upon ourselves. Such explorations can involve wrong turn (misapprehensions) and back-tracking (re-evaluation). Similarly, the lamps alongside each image represent those moments of realisation / revelation that spur our understanding onwards, and so on.
Onceagain Art Gallery: Scylla Rhiadra – Intimacy
Provocative, revelatory, rich in content and presentation, the images offered in Intimacy, are highly personal both in their exploration of Scylla’s sense of self, and in the way they can chime with each of us and our own considerations of who we are in life – digitally and physically. They are also marvellously composed and framed as individual artistic pieces that can be appreciated in their own right. All of which makes this a thoroughly engaging visit.
SLurl Details
Intimacy, Onceagain Art Gallery (Peaceful mountains, rated Adult)
Soft Melody, February 2022 – click any image for full size
Bambi (NorahBrent), is known both for her Oh Deer brand, and for her Melody region designs – Missing Melody (see here and here) and Longing Melody and, most recently, a little corner of Second Life called Soft Melody.
Sitting on a sky platform over Longing Melody (which I wrote about in Visiting Longing Melody in Second Life), this is place very different to the setting on the ground, carrying as it does more of an Oriental touch and style.
An Island Hidden in the sky.
As you will walk down the alley the blossom scent will lift you. The soft warm wind will hug you so very gently. The chimes will guide you and the cats? Well the cats will ignore you because they are still cats after all…
– Soft Melody About Land
Soft Melody, February 2022
This is a small setting, perfect for photography, at first appearing to be little more that two alleys such as might be found within a corner of a town in Japan, lined by buildings so as to form a ravine-like feel. Some of the buildings are furnished, others are empty. However, first appearances can be deceptive; there’s a lot to take in, much of it watched over by the local cats.
There is for example, the little stall at the crossroads landing point, whilst down one of the alleys sits a little teahouse / restaurant. Find your way into one of the empty houses, and you may find a door to where an external stairway leads to the upper floor and a ladder from there to a little rooftop space, one offering a little escape from the world. Across the alley from it sits another rooftop spot, this one the home of an artist’s studio.
Soft Melody, February 2022
Climb the steps rising one of the one of the alleys and you’ll come to a bridge crossing a nullah and leading to a garden space where Japanese and Chinese themes meld through the presence of Torii gates and panda bears; a further retreat that also includes rabbits and little bouncing balloons.
Rich in sakara blossom and with further little secrets awaiting discovery – look out on the water for some and under the hills for others – this is a place that is easy to visit and appreciate, all of which makes Soft Melody as an inviting a location to explore as both Missing Melody and Longing Melody.
