Tag: Art 2022

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)

Bamboo Barnes is back a Nitroglobus Roof Gallery for July, with an exhibition occupying the main a hall of Dido’s Haas’ superb arts venue. She comes with a new collection of pieces gathered under the title Colores Primarios (Primary Colours), offering a total of 21 pieces (six of which offer an engaging commentary on the core theme for the exhibition, lined as they are along one wall of the gallery’s space), with a fair number beautifully animated.

Whilst coming a touch over a year since her last exhibition at Nitroglobus, Colores Primarios shares something of a spiritual connection with that last display of her work – Tranquil Droplets -, presenting as it does reflections on the nature of life. However, where that exhibition focused on light and dark as expressions of mood, here Bamboo asks us to consider the colours we use in defining moments and moods and which, ultimately, define who we are.

What colour is the ground you cower on?
What colour is the sigh your breath makes?
What colour is that place where you fall asleep?

What are your basic colours?

– Bamboo Barnes, Colores Primarios

We’re all familiar with the concept of using colour to define our emotional states – red with embarrassment; down and blue; green with envy; a black mood; white with rage; a rosy smile, and so on. We are all likely familiar with the idea of our aura; the supposed spiritual / energy field said to surround all living things (yes, George, we know where you got your idea for the Force from!), which is also expressed in terms of colour: red, green, blue, orange, yellow, white, violet, black.

But what if, rather than standing as simple reflections of mood or state, colours were a genuine outflow of every moment of life; something informed by where we are, what we are feeling, events recently passed, and so on? Colours that, if visible, would literally paint our lives for all to see – what would they show? How would they ebb and flow? Would they further reveal us, giving expression to not only the emotions we are feeling, but the depth of those emotions (Neon Glitch)? Would they be forever flicking and changing, moment to moment (the Assemble 3 series)? Would they offer a reflection of us that is real, or own that is blurred by our own confusion?

How would they define us to both ourselves and those around us? What would we say through them?

I offer no answers here; Colores Primarios deserves to speak directly to all who see it and give pause to consider what it has to say. As always, Bamboo’s work is rich in colour and presentation, primal in look – again, reflection the exhibition’s title – and always absorbing; an exhibition once again supported by Adwehe’s colour spheres.

SLurl Details

• Nitroglobus Roof Gallery (Sunshine Homestead, rated: Moderate)

Currently open at Artspace 3042, a part of the Ribong art hub curated by San (Santoshima), is A Nightingale Sang by Bleu (Bleu Oleander), a visually engaging celebration of the magic of working with prims in Second Life.

The piece takes its title from the British romantic song A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (lyrics by Eric Maschwitz and music by Manning Sherwin), published in 1940; specifically the opening to lines of what has become the more traditional rendition of the song (Maschwitz actually wrote an initial opening verse that tends to be dropped from the majority of recordings):

That certain night, the night we met
There was magic abroad in the air.

However, rather than referencing the love between two people, the lyrics here are used to underline that moment when human imagination and expression meet the creative promise and digital beauty of the humble prim, a moment when the most magical of relationships can begin.

In this age of external mesh tools, LODs, uploads and the need to familiarise oneself with dozens of workflows and practices in order to create something within the digital void, it is easy to forget just how powerful and rich Second Life’s in-built tools and capabilities are in their ability to give all of us the ability to build and create.

Prims don’t need complex workflows or multiple different applications; everything needed to create something captivating lies right here within the viewer, or, thanks to things like texture and script libraries, just a few clicks of the mouse away. And the skills to bring it all together can be acquired whilst remaining within Second Life, rather than far away within the near-isolation of this or that graphics tool.

From the landing point A Nightingale Sang takes visitors on a journey through a darkened space in which reside the most marvellous sculptures created and animated by Bleu. In both 2D and 3D, all of them are constructed by bringing prims together and then using scripts, textures, and the tools of the viewer – notably, for the visitor, the use of Advanced Lighting Model (Preferences → Graphics → make sure Advanced Lighting Model (ALM) is checked – this will also enable projected lighting without the need to keep Shadows enabled) – to create a richly visual installation.

Equally spaced through out the rising and falling levels of the space, the pieces are perfectly positioned so that each can be appreciated in turn – again, I’d advise using the local environment settings (World → Environment → Use Shared Environment). Also, as you explore, don’t forget to look up as well as around.

These pieces are simple yet complex living demonstrations of how we can use the tools before us to bring life to what might initially look to be little more than simple shapes to create something unique; of how once we have learn to rez and glue, an entire world of potential lies within our grasp, a world we can explore alone or with friends and in which the limits as to how far we go are defined by how far we want to go.

At the top of the installation can be found a little chapel, on the “alter” of which sit those basic shapes available within the Build floater that open the door to universe of creativity. Because, as someone once said: it all starts with a cube.

SLurl Details

• A Nightingale Sang at Ribong Gallery Artspace (Mieum, rated General)