Tag: Art 2023

Saturday, July 29th, 2023 saw the opening of an exhibition of photography and art from the physical world by Theresa Hermit at the Original Campus Gallery within St. Elizabeth’s University.

I believe this is the first time I’ve witnessed Theresa’s work, but am unsure as to whether this is her first complete exhibition, or the first to be widely advertised. The term “introducing” is used in the advertising, but I gather from chatting with Pat Wheelwright, Director of Residential Living at St. Elizabeth’s, that Theresa has displayed her work there in the past (she is also both the university’s Art History teacher and current president), but these may have been limited in terms of audience, being only advertised within the university’s membership. Either way, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to witness this exhibition, which offers quite the showcase for Theresa’s multi-faceted artistic talents.

In the physical world, Theresa holds a Bachelor of Fines Arts (BFA) degree and has recently completed her Master of Fine Arts (MFA). For those not clear on the difference between these and the Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Master of Arts (MA), the latter two usually centre on the scholarly, academic and critical study, whilst the BFA and MFA centre on professional artistic practice within the chosen field of study. Her work encompasses multiple mediums including watercolour (including gouache), oil, and printmaking, whilst also enjoying drawing and  – as demonstrated in this exhibition – photography, where she also develops her own images as well as taking them.

The latter is located on the ground level of the gallery space – the exhibition covering a total of three floors within the gallery – presenting a fascinating series of black and white photographs, mostly taken at a farm in Connecticut. These show a keen eye for composition whilst the use of black and white film brings a sense of time and age to the buildings, furniture and hardware which is sublime in giving a deeper sense of narrative and history that might otherwise have not been apparent.

Within this selection are also images quite fittingly captured at a property once owned by Edward Steichen. He was both a pioneer in the craft of fashion photography and, more particularly in this case, often credited with elevating photography into a recognised art form – and I have little doubt that were he to view the images here, he would embrace them as such.

The middle and upper levels of the gallery  – and the stairways linking them – are host to a selection of Theresa’s paintings covering a range of subjects. In this, and as Theresa herself notes, she is not so much led by the artistic opportunity of something she sees, but by the emotional response she feels towards what she sees. This is perhaps most clearly seen within Darkness Falls, a painting of sunflowers set against a backdrop of smoke / dust, painted as a personal response to the events of September 11th, 2001.

Theresa also notes that she eschews “realism” in many of her paintings in favour of her emotions (what she refers to as her work being “representational”), and this further adds a personal depth to her paintings. Again, take GGP Wedding; this is a reflection of the wedding of Theresa’s great-grandparents, taken from a photograph of that event. Within it, the newly weds are shown almost ghostlike; figures and details blurred – a perfect reflection of an event that might be recalled from a time when the eye and mind were too young to capture and imprint all that was seen firmly into memory, allowing the details to become misty over time.

What is also striking about this exhibition are the notes Theresa provides (click the small, wall-mounted signs offered close to the entrances of all three levels of the gallery space). These offer a richness of information, examining the origins of the photographs and paintings, the influences that helped inform their creation, and insights into the approaches she takes to her work. These notes help carry us into Theresa’s creative processes in a very personal way.

A genuinely personal, engaging exhibition, and my thanks to Cayla (YumiYukimura) for the invite to visit!

SLurl Details

• Original Campus Gallery, St. Elizabeth’s University (Dark Dreamer, rated Adult)

Totem

tō′təm – noun

An animal, plant, or natural object serving among certain tribal or traditional peoples as the emblem of a clan or family and sometimes revered as its founder, ancestor, or guardian.

A representation of such an object.

A social group having a common affiliation to such an object.

So reads a typical dictionary definition definition for totem, a word believed to have entered the English language in the 18th century courtesy of the Ojibwe people, indigenous to the Subarctic and north-western woodlands of the North American continent. It is a term which perhaps most readily brings to mind the totem pole, although this is only one form a totem can take. It is also the one given by Lalie Sorbet to her latest exhibition of art, which opened at the Third Eye Gallery curated by Jaz (Jessamine2108) on July 29th, 2023.

Totem offers 16 AI generated, animated pieces representing plant totems intended not as emblems of a specific clan or family or ancestor, but in recognition of Nature itself – the greatest guardian for life and beauty there is on Earth.

Each of the pieces has been generated through the use of the Midjourney AI software, using a phrase or comment by Lalie, to produce images of leaves and flowers in exquisite close-up detail (thus mirroring Lalie’s equally captivating physical world macro photography). These images are then layered onto “blocks”, each with two faces (both facing the observer) each bearing an image, animated via script to move gently in opposition to one another to give the finished piece a sense of three-dimensional depth and life.

These are incredibly beautiful pieces, large in size, caught as if by a light breeze, their colours and brightness shifting in response to SL’s ambient lighting – make sure you are using the Shared Environment when visiting (World → Environment → Use Shared Environment) when visiting. They are rendered (presumably by considered post-processing by Lalie) to offer unique pieces, captivating in their presentation and potentially layered in their possible interpretation.

Take the pieces showing leaves for example. These have generally been rendered to present the lamina in a gossamer lightness, allowing major and minor veins to come to the fore, sometimes in a feather-like beauty, as they flow outwards from midrib to margins, gorgeously emphasising the life flowing through them.

In doing so, they reveal the marvellous complexity and elegance of nature’s design inherent in a leaf which otherwise tends to pass us by unseen. At the same time, the detail brought forth within each of these images echo other life-giving marvels of nature; the veins fanning outwards from the midrib, for example, are like the many outflow channels crossing the delta of a river, turning the wetlands between them into richly diverse living ecosystems.

Similarly, the pieces featuring flowers bloom not only present stunning studies which bring home the beauty and complexity of such blooms petals, stamen, stigma, anther, filament et al, their macro presentation reminds us, perhaps of both the interconnectedness of life on Earth through the simple, yet complex dance of pollination, and that it is also delicate and fragile; that if we do not learn to be better stewards of the world around us, to become better guardians of our planet, then its beauty, its very essence of life, will be all too fleeting.

I would have perhaps liked to have seen the terms Lalie used in initially used to generate each of the images through Midjourney displayed with each piece. However, this is a personal point of view and it does not diminish in any way from what is an engaging exihibition of AI art.

SLurl Details

• Third Eye Gallery (Ravenglass, rated Moderate)

In 2020, Hermes Kondor presented an exhibition of his physical world photography focused – pun intentional – on the Tejo Power Station (and now museum) in Lisbon. It was a captivating collection of photographs, richly demonstrating Hermes’ skill as a photographer and in the manner in which it tweaked curiosity about this outstanding Portuguese landmark. It’s also one I covered in The beauty of steam machines in Second Life.

While I am admittedly getting to it a little on the later side – the exhibition having opened on July 7th, 2023 – Hermes is now back with a further collection celebrating another or Lisbon’s historical industrial landmarks, and which again offers an opportunity to both admire his photographic eye and to learn about an important physical-world landmark.

Mechanical Whispers, hosted by Mareea Farrasco via her IMAGO Suburbs Galleries, presents a series of monochrome images of Lisbon’s Museu da Água (Water Museum), formerly the Barbadinhos Steam Pumping Station, responsible for pumping fresh water to the city delivered to the artificial Barbadinhos reservoir by the Aqueduto das Águas Livres (“Aqueduct of the Free Waters”), itself one of the most remarkable examples of  18th-and 19th-century Portuguese engineering.

From the 1880s through until 1928, the steam engines of the pumping station pushed water to more households across Lisbon that had been able to be reached prior to it entering service. Given its historical significance, safter its working life ended, the station eventually became a museum, retaining the great pumps and engines used to drive water from the reservoir to the city proper.

Such was the historical importance of the museum’s role in the conservation and dissemination of European cultural heritage, in 1990 it was the recipient of the prestigious Council of Europe’s European Museum of the Year Award, remaining (at the time of writing) the only Portuguese to be so honoured. Since then, the museum has continued to evolve, encompassing modern display areas offering insights into water and its importance to life, research, science, and topics such as developing sustainable supplies of fresh water in the face of climate change and population growth, as well as providing event spaces for conferences, etc.

However, it is in the steam and pump rooms where the museum holds its magic, and it is these which are the subject of Hermes’ photography. Presented entirely in monochrome, Mechanical Whispers offers an entirely unique perspective of these once mighty machines by focusing not just on their bulk and hard-edged engineering, with its heavy iron forms of its boilers and bulky pipes with oversized nuts and bolts joining their various segments, but also on the smaller – but equally important – forms of the stations, gauges, pressure valves, pistons and pressure releases.

That they are in monochrome, the images might be seen by some as missing the richness of colour evident in the actual museum, with is rich wooden floors, widespread use of brass / copper in its smaller piping and the polished steel of pressure caps and the like.  However, I’d actually disagree; the use of monochrome allows many of these pieces to use a chiaroscuro-like used of dark and light. The former, seen within the machinery itself, gives a sense of a brooding sense of presence, whilst the latter – in the form of the brickwork and natural light falling from skylights above – combines with that sense of brooding presence gives the machinery a sense of life, as if giants are asleep within the alcoves and the shadows, requiring only the slightest noise to bring them to heavy wakefulness.

Coupled with this is a marvellous use of near-macro levels of focus coupled with the use of depth of field. This again brings the small elements of the remarkable engineering present within the machinery to life, allowing us to see the beautiful simplicity of a simple spiral screw valve, together with the craftsmanship evident within something as simple as a pointer on a pressure gauge, and the elegant simplicity of making adjustments to a complex machine by simply altering the position of a piston arm.

Occupying both “hanger” buildings of Imago’s Suburbs Galleries, Mechanical Whispers is a genuinely engaging exhibition by a master photographer; one which not only presents a unique view of its subject but also for the way in which encourages the visitor to learn more about that subject and its history.

SLurl Details

• IMAGO Suburbs Galleries (Rising Phoenix, rated Moderate)

A Touch of Magic is the title Lori Bailey has given to her latest art exhibition, opened at the Lost Unicorn Gallery on July 23rd, 2023. Curated by Natalie Starlight and Nessa Nova, who together operate the always enchanting Lost Unicorn estate, the gallery is a fitting venue of Lori’s art, offering as it does a fantasy-style venue within its fairy tale castle walls that is entirely in keeping with Lori’s dream-like images.

Like myself, Lori is one of Second Life’s travellers, spending her time exploring regions and settings across the grid, and recording the things she sees in photographs presented through her Flickr account. Also like myself, she enjoys playing with EEP settings and experimenting with them to produce her core images.

However, and quite unlike, me, she possesses an artist’s eye and a compositional style that combine to produce genuinely enchanting images of the the places she visits, together with thoroughly engaging avatar studies (an ability I have never come close to mastering), in which post-processing plays a minor role compared to the overall original composition and framing of each picture.

All of this is every much in evidence within A Touch of Magic as it occupies the main lower gallery space at Lost Unicorn Gallery, mixing avatar studies and landscape pieces with easy grace whilst fully demonstrating Lori’s self-developed talent as a Second Life photographer-artist.

Noting that she prefers other tools to PhotoShop, she exposes her pieces to minimal re-touching / editing, tending to limit such activities to colour enhancement, some depth of field blurring, and light touches to adjust light. The result of this are images which have an genuine ethereal air about them, which has unique, and very different ways of drawing the observer into them.

Within the landscape pieces, this etherealness manifests as unique interpretations of the the locations captured, allowing us to view the scenes through Lori’s eyes and imagination whilst simultaneously both presenting their beauty while also translating it into a dreamlike, almost empyrean state, where  light become a gossamer, almost tactile presence which seems to drift through each piece as if as much a physical part of the scene despite its impalpable nature, making it as much an embodiment of the scene as anything to be be found within it, be it tree, plant, boat, object or structure.

For the avatar studies, this ethereal quality gives a sense of narrative and emotion that reaches well beyond the limits of the image itself; a narrative mostly clearly, perhaps, suggested through a gaze directed beyond the canvas by the subject of the image, or through the look being exchanged between those featured within the image.

Like the music she adores and which forms such an important part of her life (something else we happen to share; I am rarely without music surrounding me), Lori’s art is melodic in form and presentation, each piece combining individual notes and movements – from focus to subject, to lighting to environment – to deliver a finished pieces which, whilst “symphonic” might sound overly descriptive, are undeniably  both lyrical and harmonious – and a delight to the eye and the imagination.

SLurl Details

• Lost Unicorn Gallery (rated: Moderate)

July 15th saw the opening of The Spirits of the Forest, an exhibition of pieces by Hermes Kondor at the New Life Gallery within the campus of St. Elizabeth’s University.

As a photographer / artist, Hermes is constantly extending his range of approaches and techniques, with a number of his recent exhibitions focusing on the use of AI tools – largely Midjourney, I believe I’m correct in saying – and also on his macro compositional work featuring still life on the smallest of scales. It is for its richness, range and compositional quality that I’ve come to deeply admire and appreciate Hermes’ work, and it is always a pleasure to cover one of his exhibitions in these pages.

Comprising 27 images split across the three levels of the gallery – all of which are connected via an elevator rather than stairs – The Spirits of the Forest represents a collection of his more recent explorations with the use of AI generated pieces combined with other digital photographic techniques to offer some marvellously expressive pieces on the theme of “hidden guardians” – spirits, sprites and minor deities once thought to inhabit and protect forests and woodlands.

Such beliefs  – and the worship of trees themselves –  was common among many cultures, east and west, and often linked with ideas of fertility, renewal / rebirth and the cycle of life. The link to fertility tended to lean many such spirits to be personified as female deities in most cultures, although there were male figures among them. Similarly, while most were considered benevolent and giving, some cultures did have more malevolent forest / tree spirits or at least have a number given to a more mischievous nature.

Within The Spirits of the Forest, Hermes appears to draw inspiration from the more western traditions of female woodland spirits, stirring in a touch of  what might be fantasy elven leanings. How much of this is by design and how much is the result of the parameters given to his AI software is unclear, but the majority of spirits within the images appear to have strongly western European looks. Not that this is in any way a critique; the figures are not intended to be representative of specific tree deities, they are rather intended to springboard our imaginations into mental narratives on he nature of the spirits and trees featured within them – and possibly more besides.

For me, these deeply expressive images brought to mind a range of thoughts, from reflections on the nature of matriarchal religion and the argument put forward by Robert Graves that, within western European cultures, the multiple beliefs in female deities in all their forms – including those of the forest – are rooted in an ancient belief in a single “mother goddess” whom he called “The White Goddess”. mixed with this came reflections on how common artistic interpretations of the likes of Tolkien’s elves down the decades since the publication of Lord of the Rings may have played a role in how the AI tools producing the base images on which Hermes has built his finished pieces, all the way through to the sheer artistry of the displayed pieces and how each presents a world of mystical beauty which appears to sit just beyond our reach, but is nevertheless fully visible to the imagination.

Given such a rich mix of reactions, it should come as no surprise that I thoroughly recommend The Spirits of the Forest as a very worthy visit, forming as it does an exhibition of deeply captivating images  all of which can be appreciated in their own right both as digital art and for their ability to offer a single-frame story, and which collectively can take the mind on a journey of expositional enquiry and thought.

SLurl Details

• New Life Gallery (Dark Dreamer, rated Adult)