Category: Reviews

Currently open at Tyne’s Fine Art Gallery, owned and curated by Drw (Drwyndwn Tyne), is an exhibition of paintings by the Dutch Masters who came to prominence during the Dutch Golden Age, and gave rise to important new genres in painting.

It can often be difficult to bring real-world art into Second Life and have it translate well enough to be fully appreciated, particularly when dealing with the works of artists like Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Ludolf Bakhuizen, Gerard van Honthorst, and so on, whose works are so well-known. However, this exhibition demonstrates that not only can it be done, but that if handled correctly, it can present a means of presenting masterpieces from all over the world in a single exhibit which might otherwise be next to impossible to achieve, and do so in a way that is entirely faithful to the originals.

Dutch Masters – Tyne’s Fine Art Gallery

Some 44 pieces are on display at the gallery, and care has been taken to ensure any copyrights held by the museums hosting the original pieces have not been violated. Each piece has also been reproduced in the precise aspect ration of the original, with an additional 15% added to allow for viewing in Second Life, thus adding to the authentic look of the pieces on display. The gallery itself beautifully reflects the look and feel of a classic physical world art gallery, with muted tones, and pictures all individually lit and presented with their own catalogue-style notes.

However, the power of this exhibition lies within the picture frames themselves. These have been scripted so that when clicked by a visitor, two options are displayed: Museum Card and Examine. The former will offer you a texture containing the notes accompanying the piece as presented by the gallery where it is displayed (and which matches the notes displayed under each of the pieces in Drw’s gallery).

Select Examine, however, and you’ll be invited to click the painting again. This will place your avatar in a seated hover position and focus your camera directly on the art (should your camera fail to orient itself after clicking the painting, tap ESC once to adjust it).

Thus, you are able to examine the painting in fine detail, almost as if standing before it in a physical world gallery.

The power of this method of presentation can be appreciated when viewing any of the pieces Drw has included in the exhibition. However, I would venture to suggest it particularly  comes into its own when looking at those in the selection which might be regarded as being very familiar to the observer, such as with Rembrandt’s self-portrait (shown on the right – click for full size), the original of which is hanging in the National Gallery of Art.

This is a truly outstanding exhibition, bringing together a magnificent selection of art from the Dutch Golden Age which would otherwise be impossible to see under a single roof in the physical world. As such, it is an exhibit not to be missed.

SLurl Details

• Tyne’s Fine Art Gallery

Prison is the title of Cica Ghost’s latest full sim installation in Second Life. It opened on Sunday, October 11th, and it is a most curious piece.

On an island bathed in Cica’s familiar muted windlight settings sits what at first glance might seem to be a giant construction site. Great walls of steel bars rise into the air to cross hatch the sky like some enormous scaffolds, or steel reinforcements missing their concrete sheaths. Only the title of the installation reveals them to be what they are: the “walls” of a “prison”. But what kind of prison is open the sky, and has multiple exits to the outside world, all of which open on demand from those within?

“In this prison, all the doors will open for you, and you’ll be able to escape at any time,” Cica says of the installation. “But you won’t feel like going away. And even when you finally leave, you will want to come back.”

And so it is; step through the first door (you may need to touch it up close to get it to open), and you’ll find yourself in something of an open maze with no single defined path through it. Instead, any number of routes through the metal doors may lead you back outside; and once there, you most likely will return inside again and trace another path through the maze, and then possibly another and another.

Is there meaning or metaphor here? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Maybe the piece is a commentary on the many paths and choices we face as we travel through life. Or perhaps a metaphor for life as a learning process: we attempt this or that, find it doesn’t lead us to here we wish to be, so we go back and try a different route.

Or perhaps Cica is simply enticing us with a little game. That there is no deeper meaning other than the desire to sate our curiosity as we seek various routes through the prison’s maze; it’s all in fun. And perhaps that’s why the crows we encounter along the way all cock their heads towards us, as we pass, what seem to be knowing grins on their beaks.

The only way to perhaps find out is to pay a visit for yourself.

SLurl Details

• Prison (Rated: Moderate)

Opening at 11:00 SLT on Sunday, October 2015 at Berg by Nordan Art, curated by Kate Bergdorf, are two new exhibits, and what marks something of a change for the Nordan om Jorden region.

Taking place in Kate’s cosy skyborne gallery space is Passively by Sina Souza, while taking up the ground level of the region, reached via teleport board from the gallery and which has up until now been the setting for a series of eye-catching landscape designs by Kate, is an installation by Giovanna Cerise entitled Memories.

The latter is inspired  by the poem Non recidere, forbice, quel volto (“Do not chop away, shears, that face”) by Eugenio Montale from his 1939 collection Le Occasioni. The design and execution of the installation, to me, both reflects the nuance of the poem and also echoes elements from some of Giovanna’s past works in form and colour, if not in actual content.

Central to the piece is the motif of a face – presumably the face of the woman referred to in the first stanza of the poem, as the narrator pleads with the shears of time not to erase it from his memory. This motif is repeated across the region in various forms, most noticeably on the faces of multiple black and white semi-transparent cubes arranged in a series of three-dimensional chequerboards.

Camming around these cubes causes a degree of “alpha-ing” between the black and white cubes, so they appear to swap positions. as they do so, the images on their faces flicker in and out of view, further suggestive of a memory fading in and out focus, again echoing the poem’s theme.

Sina’s pieces – 3 in all – present images in soft tones and in a large format which draws the observer into them. While the tones in each might be muted, the emotions they evoke aren’t necessarily so, with each piece powerfully reflecting its title: Lost Memories, Visual Ignorance, and The Transience of Existence.

Lost Memories offers something of a link with Giovanna’s work, but all three are extraordinary in both presentation and message, and are deserving of considered study in order to appreciate all the nuances of context.

As noted, both exhibits open at 11:00 SLT on Sunday, October 11th, with music by Eif (aka d-oo-b).

SLURL Details

• Berg by Nordan Art Gallery (Rated Moderate)

Officially opening at 12:00 noon SLT on Tuesday, October 13th  at CBK Art Gallery is a new exhibition  by gallery owner / curator, Ceakay (CK) Ballyhoo, entitled Pop Up Love. On display are six pieces of CK’s art created in the physical world using aquarelle pencils, and presented as a set of pop-up story books.

“The drawings are simple, childlike,” CK says of the pieces,. “with silhouettes portraying a sensation, an idea, rather than a detailed picture.”

In keeping with the child-like theme, the gallery space has been in part decorated in the style of a child’s bedroom or play room. Toys lay scattered about, coloured stars hang from the sky as if suspended from a ceiling, revolving slowly with a glowing crescent Moon, casting shadows across the limited of the gallery like a child’s mobile might cast shadows on the walls of a room.

Each of the books is individually bound, and again in keeping with the title of the exhibit, bears a title related to love: Forever Love, Fragile Love, Hopeful Love, Lost Love, New Love, and All Love. If closed, they can be opened with a click, revealing the picture within which as CK says, is designed to convey the feeling or sensation suggested by the title, rather the provide a detailed image or interpretation. Clicking an open book will close it once more.

As well as Pop Up Love, some of CK’s in-world photography can be seen hanging from the walls of the gallery garden, while in one corner of the gallery sits a little multi-coloured children’s play house, and within it, a series of paintings of a landscape as might have been drawn by a young child. These paintings and the photographs around the gallery edges are all for sale, and if you follow the teleport “door” in the corner of the house, you’ll be carried up to the landscape itself, which CK has created in a skybox.

This is a charming exhibition of work by CK, imaginatively presented and which brings a smile to one’s face. As noted,Pop Up Love officially opens on Tuesday, October 13th at 12:00 noon SLT with music by The Vinnie Show. However, the gallery is open now for those who would like to visit ahead of the opening.

Should you decide to do so, don’t forget to take a walk through the gates into CK’s Mistwood Isle woods and garden, now rich in autumnal colours and incorporating a Halloween theme in the Devil’s Den corner.

SLurl Details

• CBK Art Gallery SLurl (Rated: Adult)