Tag: Art 2022

What fascinates me about ritual is its primal essence, reaching way back to a culture’s birth. They may be highly decorative or stylized versions of cherished concepts. These inflexible portraits of a culture are meant to endure the tests of time.

– Haveit Neox, Golden Light

With these words Haveit Neox introduces Golden Light, a small-scale installation that opened on March 19th, 2022 within the Ribong Artspace 2336, curated by San (Santoshima). While the scale might be comparatively small, this is an installation that offers a personally stylised and richly layered exploration of the subject of ritual, with symbolism that may well reach beyond what might first be apparent.

The core installation takes the form of a large bowl set beneath a dome of stars (whilst not expressly required, I set my viewer’s time to Midnight as the stars suggest – like many rituals – this is one undertaken after the Sun has set). The walls of the bowl bear four large paintings whilst its floor is largely given over to a vast pit, dark and foreboding and crossed by a single tightrope. It is a setting that can be best summed up using Haveit’s own words:

Draped chairs of giants stand among the plant life. The plants have yet to bloom; the seats have yet to be occupied. The landscape is portrayed entirely in 2D, except for the tightrope apparatus suspended over the deep pit. A supplicant brings a pinecone offering from the real world. Perched precariously on a tightrope over a deep, dark pit, perfect balance must be maintained for the ceremony to succeed.

– Haveit Neox, Golden Light

All of this is plain from looking at the installation, marking it as a statement on ritual; however, it is what is presented rather than what is going on that brings forth the richness of the piece.

Take how the tightrope is held across the pit by a pair of stags. Whilst perhaps superseded in some respects by the likes of bears, boars, great cats, raptors etc., as the totemic animals of deities across Indo-European cultures and civilisations, the stag nevertheless was of importance to the Scythians and the Kurgans, associated with strength and fertility; concepts that were carried westward, embraced by paganism. Similarly, across the Atlantic, the stag was seen as totemic of numerous tribal gods, and a harbinger of fertility. Additionally, white stags have oft been seen as symbolic of protectors watching over the land, the tribe, etc., and thus venerated.

Similarly, the pine cone, with its natural Fibonacci sequence has, throughout multiple civilisations from Ancient Egypt and Assyria on one side of the world, the Mayans and Incas on the other, and all the way through to modern paganism, been seen as both a symbol of fertility and of enlightenment;  And I need hardly mention the physical and symbolic importance of trees to many cultures. Meanwhile the four paintings are placed at the cardinal points, so-called because they are the chief – or true – directions, whilst the reference to gold enfolds the idea of purity (of both ritual and self).

Thus, by including these specific elements, Haveit encompasses symbolise that have played a role in humanity’s cultures down civilisations down through the halls of time – and which continue to be a part of our cultures, rituals and religions to this day, even if we don’t always recognise them as such.

For example, we are all familiar with the role of trees within the Christian religions: humanity’s separation from God started with a tree (Eden’s tree of the knowledge of good and evil), with the path to redemption marked by a tree (the cross upon which Christ was nailed). However, what might not be so well recognised is that both the pine cone and the stag also have their places in Christian religions; the stag for example, is seen as representative of Christ, standing in opposition to the snake’s totem in representing Satan, with the white stag symbolic of God’s protection.

This continuing need for (/appropriation of) rituals and symbols down the ages is further marked by the fact the supplicant within the installation carries not an actual pine cone across the tightrope, but the image of a pine cone. It is symbolic of all that has happened down the ages, and which still happens in various ways and forms today, allowing it to stand as a symbol for future ritual, whatever form it might take (and in this, I was stuck by the way the paint itself resembles a tablet, something that has both ancient and modern connotations for ritual!).

Simple in style, complex is interpretation, Golden Light is another wonderful mix of art, metaphor and meaning from Haveit.

SLurl Details

• Golden Light, Ribong Artspace  2336 (Mieum, rated General)

Update, June 27th, 2022: Art Korner has Closed.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside awakes

Carl Jung, October 1916, Letters, Vol 1, page 33

These are the words Selen Minotaur has chosen to frame her exhibition The Inner Path, which opened within a skybox gallery space at Frank Atisso’s Art Korner Gallery on March 17th 2022.

The quote is from one of a series of letters Jung wrote during correspondence with Fanny Bowditch Katz, an American woman who had suffered a severe breakdown following the death of her father in 1911 (she she was 37 at the time), and who was referred to Jung for treatment in 1912. At the time Jung wrote these words, she had actually ceased direct therapy under his guidance (for which she had travelled from the US to Switzerland in order to receive), but she and Jung continued to correspond in regards to her condition for several years.

Over the years these words have become relatively well-known, appearing as they do on posters and pictures of the motivational kind. This is actually a shame, because in reducing Jung’s words to something to be framed and / or hung on a wall, we reduce their essential truth from something to be genuinely explored to a statement we can look at and nod towards sagely in a strokey-chin moment and without ever progressing further towards understanding and moving beyond that affliction.

And what is that affliction? Our increasing inability to really understand who we are by looking within. We are complex beings, each with his or her struggles, hurts, wants, needs, conflicts. At some point, we all have what Jung refers to as a “confrontation with the unconscious” that can leave us lost, vulnerable, uncertain, lonely, depressed, isolated, empty, and more. Indeed it is something that can happen ore than once through our lives – and something increasingly exacerbated in the way we are persistently bombarded by ideas that the path to happiness and peace lay through the acquisition of wealth and things, that we can never truly or fully be happy unless we have X, Y or Z and / or that spirituality can never be achieved unless we conform to this or that doctrine, and so on.

Yet, as Jung knew only too well – thanks to his own experiences in 1913, and which affected him through the next several years, helping to formulate his ideas through self-examination, military service and in trying to help patients like Fanny Bowditch Katz – the genuine path to understanding ourselves, to gaining balance (mental and spiritual)  – lies within ourselves.

I realise the under the circumstances you have described you feel the need to see clearly. But your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.

Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesces into unity. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside awakes.

Carl Jung, October 1916, Letter, Vol 1, page 33.

Through the seven rooms of The Inner Path, Selen similarly challenges us through images and props and metaphor to look within, to understand what makes us who we are, and undertake a journey of self and release. Starting in greyscale monochrome and progressing through the first hints of tone and hues and finally arriving in full colour, these are images that reflect elements of the journey, the rooms in which they hang additionally presented with sculptures and pieces intended to tip our thinking back and forth, encouraging responses and interpretations rather than presenting outright directions.

Some of the symbolism might at first seem easy to grasp: the progression from greyscale to colour reflecting our rise to self-awareness, the presence of yin/yang representing acceptance of the “negatives” and “positives” we possess, and so on. However, things here are far more nuanced, the metaphors more subtle than might at first seem to be the case, as with the words within the first room and the sculpture of the caged figure (the latter, for example juxtapositioning the idea that as long as we look inward, we will remain caged and confused, trapped within self, with the reality of Jung’s words that only through continued navigation of self heart (/soul), can we genuinely start to reach any sense of understanding, balance and release).

The inner path we travel when we look within ourselves is unique to each of us, even if  – should we compare – there are similarities in encounters we each have along the way. As such, just as Selen offers suggestions and uses visual metaphors throughout The Inner Path, and prompts rather than explicitly directs, so I am reluctant to impinge more of my own thinking on all that is offered through this installation.

Instead, I encourage you to go along yourself when free of physical distractions, and walk the halls of The Inner Path with open eyes and mind, giving your inner self a chance to speak as the images and setting prompt. And don’t be surprised if you find yourself passing through the rooms more than once, as this is an installation which, if we allow it, will speak to us constantly.

SLurl Details

• Art Korner Gallery (Deju, rated: Moderate)

Currently open for viewing at Vally Ericson’s (Valium Lavender’s) Art Street Gallery is a small, engaging exhibition of art by Purple Leonis (Nel4481). Entitled Dark Paradise, it comprises just ten images (more’s the pity, given the gallery space and the beauty of the art), each of which is rich in motif and story, touching on period settings and fantasy.

I have always enjoyed Purple’s work, as she always uses pose, colour, light and setting in her images to communicate with us by painting an entire story within each image. It is an approach Purple uses to both provide single-framed narratives and entire tales spread across multiple images. Within Dark Paradise, she provides a mix of both.

On entering the wing of the gallery where the exhibition is framed, one encounters a trio of images, a couple in formal wear, he standing, she sitting, in a traditional photographic pose oft seen in the early days of photograph, a closer shot of the woman seen in the first image, this time with her eyes covered by what appears to be a jewel-encrusted mask, and the third a woman in red, surrounded by billowing waves of red fabric. All three are in many respects “classic” portraits and might be taken as such.

From here the images change in tone, becoming more fanciful – and I use this word in terms of “fantasy” – as we progress, introducing magical motifs (mushrooms, ravens); genuine flights of fancy (drifting on a bunch of hand-held balloons), to genuine trips of fantasy (alien creatures, centaurs) and finally a series suggestive of vampires. Thus, we appear to have thematically frame images that exist individually or in smaller groups connected by theme (the couple and the woman in the first two images, the vampire theme in the final three).

However, all ten images are linked in a broader theme: the entire setting suggests that we are within a room within a grand house; the pictures of the walls a mix of family portraits and strangely themed images chosen by whoever live here – perhaps the couple in the first image.

Thus we have something of a sense of the familial here, while the furnishings, colours and fixtures learn into the Gothic in a way, leading us toward the vampiric elements in the final three images, and so we’re gently led into the idea we are perhaps in a dream, an unfolding story, progressing from the first image which (either deliberately or not is down to the artist to say) is called The Beginning, and progressing around the final trio and their darker theme of blood and death / the undead.

True, some of the images appear out-of-place to theis core vampire idea – floating on a bunch of balloons, centaurs, strange creatures – but how many dreams are entirely linear and without non-sequitur flashes? Plus, look at the tone of the more fantastical images: the centaur is linked to death (and thus the undead), for example, the monster in Cavaliere could be mindful of a vampire in its “true” form as beloved of monster movies) so even these images are perhaps not so far removed from the idea that we are entering the dark paradise of dreams and imagination.

I would have personally preferred to have seen this exhibition continued through more of the gallery space, such is the depth of narrative in the images, but don’t let the brevity put you off; Dark Paradise is a thoroughly engaging pocket exhibition.

SLurl Details

• Art Street Gallery (Valium SL 1, rated Moderate)

Update, June 27th, 2022: Art Korner has Closed.

Wednesday, March 9th, 2022 saw the opening of an exhibition at Frank Atisso’s Art Korner Main Gallery that features images by two artists on a shared theme, but which are strikingly different in their style and visual impact.

The artists in question are Dannika Dryke and Traci (Traci Ultsch), who have split the gallery between themselves, with Danni’s images located on the lower floor, and Traci’s on the upper. The central theme is that of portraits, but the two styles offered by the artists are extraordinarily different.

On the lower level, Danni presents a series of large format images that might been seen as “traditional” modern portraits: the subject the centre of the image sans and background distractions, (largely) minimal visible posing, the colours clean and natural in tone. These are images that allow us to focus solely on the subject, drawing us into a study of their look and appearance and – oh, so gently – into a wider consideration of their nature as revealed (or imposed, depending on your viewpoint) by the pose they have struck.

These are picture that speak to the art of photography as form of modern portraiture that has largely taken over from the more formalised use of paint and canvas to immortalise an individual. With most images presented as head and shoulders / chest level, they reveal the avatar-as-a-person, someone who exists independently from any human operator behind the screen. Within the eyes, we can perceive life and mood, within the expression there lies emotion and and intelligence, within the choice of clothing a glimpse of character and nature. Such is the depth of life within each image, were the subject to lean out of the monitor and offer an introduction, it wouldn’t be in the least bit surprising!

Life and vitality are also very much in evidence in the images presented by Traci on the gallery’s upper level – but in a very different way. Where Danni opts to go the more “traditional” route of portraiture, Traci leans into a more expressive presentation, the images swept with brush-like swirls of light or splattered with dark tones a-la Pollock or stamped with blocks of Warhol-esque colour to present bold statement of life in which the entire image speaks – subject, colour, contrast – to present not so much the individual, but the sense of mood / emotion, and presence / vitality of the subject.

These are images in which there is a lot going on, the very depth of elements drawing us into each picture, not so much to decrypt or understand it, but simply to flow with the narrative as it forms ideas and stories that are as unique and individual as the images and their colours.

Taken individually, each of these displays of art has much to attract the eye; taken together, and they offer a marvellous juxtaposition and conjoining of style and content that is  wholly engaging.

SLurl Details

• Art Korner Main Gallery (Deju, rated Moderate)

What is it to take a picture?

I ask that to myself and I let that question absorb me subconsciously, continuously as I render what I see into a frame so that elements of composition, light and background fuse in a balance in dependent from the subject.

The subject means nothing. 

– from the introduction of RealUnreal

What is the real nature of a photograph? Once upon a time, cameras and photographs were a means to freeze a moment in time; a memory, something that might become an instant marked in history or a simple sharing of a family activity, a moment of friendship or love or something else.

Today, however, almost everyone has a camera at their fingertips. From the advent of the basic point-and-click “instant” camera through the rise of digital camera to the merging of camera and cellphone / smartphone, we have all become photographers. And with the increase in digital editing software readily accessed through ‘phone and computer, we have all become self-styled digital artists. Further, such is the skill we have developed in using such post-processing editing tools that it perhaps prompts the question: how much of an image remains true – remains real – to its subject, and how much is “unreal”, the result of the photographer imposing their subjective interpretation of their subject through cropping, light and colour adjustments, changes in focus, and other editorial techniques?

These are some of the questions posed in  a new exhibition of images  by Axiomatic Clarity, gathered from both the physical world and Second Life, which is currently on display at Eviana Robbiani’s Vibes Gallery. The title of the exhibition is RealUnreal – which itself references the fact the images offered are from both the physical and virtual realms.

Although the methodology is a good compromise it still does not grasp what I am looking at. Do I know what that is, do I like how it manifests, do I let it change myself?

– from the introduction of RealUnreal

Across the three gallery halls and the spaces between, Axiom presents a marvellous collection of predominantly black-and-white or monochrome images, with two of the halls focused on images from the physical world, and one on images from Second Life. They are all evocative; all have a story to tell. They challenge us to see them as images offered for display and how the artist arrived at their finished appearance; that is, what is the reality of their focus and content, and how much is “unreal” – the result of that subjective imposition placed on each by the artist through the editorial process? Indeed, what does each say about the artist’s approach to photography and developing a balance between the subject of each image, and the story the photographer feels drawn to tell?

Is it possess[ion], is it obsession, is it a form of growth?

The deeper to discriminate at a deeper and abstract level, a level where the photographic language borders the inexpressible and even replaces the subject entirely … and I tentatively find that balance.

– from the introduction of RealUnreal

These are complex questions, worthy of being pondered given they are central to the photographer’s approach and execution of their art, with RealUnreal mixing fabulously expressive we have a complex, visually compelling selection of art that draws us into the questions of “reality” vs. “unreality” and the drives that govern a photographer in the creation of their art.

SLurl Details

• Vibes Gallery (Isola Del Giglio, rated: Adult)