Tag: Blip Mumfuzz

Landscape photography is an art I greatly admire. Within Second Life it offers a means to capture settings and places which – the nature of the platform being what it is – might otherwise prove transient for a wide variety of reasons. Through the images taken of them, we might revisit places which might otherwise have vanished forever, rather than aging and changing with time and allow us multiple opportunities to revisit and appreciate.

As a demonstration of this, the Kondor Art Square, part of Hermes Kondor’s art hub, is hosting an exhibition of exceptional Second Life landscape art captured by Mareea Farrasco. Comprising 20 images gathered from across Second Life, the collection is called simply Landscapes, with each piece capturing its subject uniquely and beautifully. Each has been carefully and perfectly post-processed to give the impression of having been painted, adding a further sense of depth to their presentation, as well as demonstrating the validly of such editing when performed by an artist who understands the proper use of the tools at her disposal.

These are places which may be recognised by seasoned SL explorers – or, equally, they may not. However, whether or not you happen to recognise any given place is the collection doesn’t actually matter. What is of import is the beauty within each piece.

In this, Mareea’s eye, framing and editing combine to produce pieces which are immediately and richly engaging, drawing one into each of them in turn, offering hints of narrative and suggestions of memory. They speak to the purity of art in its ability to portray and present beauty for its own sake, without necessarily carrying a deeper meaning.

“Landscapes with a message” is very much the theme of the second exhibition I’m covering here: that of Blip Mumfuzz’s Landscapes from a Lost World, currently open at Serena Art Centre.

Blip is another artist whose work I admire immensely, hence why I cover so many of her exhibitions. Like Mareea, she has an innate ability to draw us into the heart of her images, together with an ability to direct our focus and weave stories. Her use of colour, angle and editing is such that her images can have both clarity and at times border on the abstract.

Blip’s art is often capable of speaking to a wider theme; and such is this case with Landscapes from a Lost World. Set within an environment – the abandoned, fading structures of an old farm – specifically created by Blip in which to display them, and which is thus as much a part of the exhibition as the images, the exhibition actually presents a mix of landscape images and life studies, all focused on a message highly relevant to the physical world in which we currently live.

However, rather than offer my own interpretation of the setting and images, I’ll instead offer Blip’s own description and, like her, leave you to follow the advice on viewer settings and explore the exhibition so that the images, indoors and out, to speak to you within the framing of Blip’s words.

In the face of the imminent climate-induced collapse of our modern technological civilization, the decrepit farm carries a multiplicity of meanings: societal decay, ways of life forever lost, economic and social collapse, and stands as an indictment of the sociopathic billionaires who are abandoning the rest of humanity and all its magnificent achievements in order to save themselves and to hold onto their power as long as possible.

Looking back from a time 25 years in the future, the images, which are scattered around the “farm”, should be seen as nostalgic dream images of our lost world.  A world that was once, within living memory, alive and vibrant; full of life, culture, love, hopes, and dreams, now being destroyed by the greedy and powerful.

– Blip Mumfuzz

Two very different, be equally engaging exhibitions open through May 2025, and I recommend both to your eyes and thoughts.

SLurl Details

• Mareea Farrasco – Landscapes, Kondor Art Square (Royal Tea, rated Adult)
• Blip Mumfuzz, Landscapes from a Lost World, Serena Arts Centre (Serena Hub, rated Moderate)

Currently open within the Suburbs sky gallery space at Mareea Farrasco’s IMAGOLand, is an exhibition of photography by Blip Mumfuzz. Entitled Black and White, it is perhaps a slight departures from Blip’s past exhibitions in that – as the name implies – Blip eschews her usual lean towards a richness of colour palette and explorations of tone and colour within her landscapes and images, as seen with the likes of Exaggerations (reviewed in 2022), or for capturing the mood and tone of entire regions, as seen within Images of Skrunda (also reviewed in 2022) in favour of a dive into the world of black-and-white photography / image processing.

And it is another tour-de-force demonstration of both images capture and processing; the section of images found within the two hangers  of the gallery space (and outside on the tarmac!) are simply eye-popping in their depth and content.

I’ve long admired Blip’s art because of her many abilities and approaches. She has, for an example, an eye for creating images that hover between offering a complete scene whilst simultaneously encouraging the eye to focus down with macro-like intensity onto individual elements – a pot apparently tossed aside here, a towel draped over a bath there, and to on – imbuing the completed image with a layer of prompts which may prompt the imagination to create a story.

For example: who hung the cap on the handle of a garden fork? Was it the gardener taking time out to mop his or her brow, or a youngster who has decided they don’t want the encumbrance of the hat whilst playing?  Or is it simply, like the sheets hanging on the line behind it, just set out to dry in the day’s sunlight?  And what of the corner of an old building (or barn?) where a door stands open, the darkness inside beckoning? What might we find on stepping through? At the same time her compositional skill can produce images that blur the line between the digital and the physical to the point the eye can be tricked into thinking it is looking at a scene from the latter rather than the former.

In other words, Blip has an innate ability to draw us into her images, to not so much see them, but experience and explore them; and this is more than evidenced within Black and White. Admittedly, not all of the images presented are necessarily new creations; there was at least one I recognise for certain from Blip’s Images of Skrunda and one I seem to recall from Urban and Industrial Images (2021, and reviewed here), although I’m not 100% certain on the latter.

But the fact that these images may well reply of post-processing to achieve their monochromatic finish doesn’t matter. Black and white photography / processing is in many respects a lot harder than working with colour; it is an unforgiving mistress prone to highlighting errors and imperfections – and this is true when converting colour images to black-and-white; yes, often the software will do the basics for you, but to get the genuine look and tone of a black-and-white image, with its clarity of line, light, shadow and so on, takes time and practice. And as these piece show, Blip has an artist’s skill in bringing this factors to the fore such that the pieces in this collect stand more as monochrome “originals” that anything that started life in the world of colour-.

In being completely honest, I could have perhaps done without the nose and wing of a 747 being shoved through the the roofs of the hanger galleries – by a quick right-click derender soon eliminated that such that it did not intrude on my enjoyment and appreciation of this collection – and as such, I again strong commend it as being well worth viewing.

SLurl Details

• IMAGOLand and Art Galleries (Androviel, rated Moderate)

Having opened on April 24th, 2024, the May exhibition at Aneli Abeyante’s La Maison d’Aneli brings together three unique talents in the world of Second Life art, in three highly individual and engaging exhibitions. As usual, all three can be reached from the ground level of the gallery, either via the main teleport disk, or by walking onto the “whirlpool” teleport on the floor directly in from of the three large posters advertising the exhibitions.

Blip Mumfuzz needs no introduction to regular readers of these pages; I’ve been an admirer for her art for a long time, and have often reviewed her exhibitions. Blip has a way with the images she creates of the Second Life places she visits which sets her work apart from merely being landscape photographs. She is unafraid to flood her work with colour, sometimes to the point of it being almost abstract, whilst elsewhere she captures marvellous scene which evoke the rich diversity of nature and the wildness of its growth whilst also, through a subtle direction of the eye to linear elements within them, can impose a sense of order and / or subdivision.

These linear elements can come in many forms – the framing of, or focus on tree trunks in a grove; the subtle splitting of a scene by a hedgerow or shrubs; the more direct references to order through the inclusion of fences, gates and doorways; the natural stepping grace of rock formations or the overlay of hillslopes, small to large – or even the simple foreground focus on stalks of grass growing against a background of foliage or rock. This technique is much in evidence through the pieces making up Blip’s multi-level exhibition at La Maison d’Aneli, particularly in the upper section of the exhibit, which she has  – appropriately enough – entitled Fences, a selection of pieces intended to offer reflections on a number of physical and metaphorical reflections o nature, art, photography and – life, as Blip herself notes:

Fences are rich symbols, signifying barriers, or boundaries, both physical and metaphorical, protection, security, division, exclusion, confinement. In art they can signify isolation, societal restrictions, and the tension between freedom and constraint. They can serve as a metaphor for personal boundaries or emotional barriers. The fences in my images are broken or partial suggesting barriers broken, or limits eroded over time.

– Blip Mumfuzz

Within their joint exhibition, artist, videographer and social commentator (and a conscience of the world through his work) Tutsy Navarathna and lighting and media artist Adwehe present what might be best referred to as an artistic commentary on modern life and the horribly pervasive banality, mundanity and shallowness of modern advertising. It’s a theme (and threat) most easily expressed through the artists’ own words:

Whether you’re a Pop-Artist, Cubist, Surrealist, Futurist, Expressionist, Psychedelist, Post-Impressionist or even a Promptist!… Come and enjoy the captivating experience of being plunged into a whirlwind of megabit-deficient pixels! Let yourself be drawn into the strangest, most fantastic, most dreamlike, most sensual vision of an extravagant metaverse parasitized by invasive advertising slogans!

– Tutsy and Adwehe

On arrival, it is important to accept the local Experience in order to see the exhibition under the correct environment and lighting. There is a sign about this at the main teleport disk landing point, but I found I had to descend the steps to the lower level in order to trigger the Experience dialogue.

I admit I found this installation a little hard to get into – whilst appreciating the pop-art nature in the use of colours within it – and felt that perhaps some of the images could perhaps have been a little larger for more comfortable viewing. However, the humour across several is clear (and I have to admit to chuckling at one image which pokes fun at the oft-referenced commentary on the inverse relationship between male genitalia size and the need for big / fast cars). However, I’ll leave it you you to appreciate the installation for yourselves!

SLurl Details

• La Maison d’Aneli main landing (Virtual Holland, rated Moderate)

I received an invitation from Blip Mumfuzz to visit her latest exhibition, Exaggerations which opened on April 8th at Andante Gallery, operated by Jules Catlyn and Iris Okiddo (IrisSweet), and which will remain available through until May 8th.

Blip is an artist whose work I’ve come to admire for its richness of colour and depth, and this is very much celebrated within Exaggerations, a series of images taken around Second Life in which one or more colours have been exaggerated and / or a colour filter has been overlaid.

The result is a series of images that are both stunning and subtle. In some, landscapes have become alien worlds and plants turned into strange new life forms. Others she shrubs turned into pieces of modern abstract art and / or play with abstract expressionism; still others are more subtle in touch: gentle highlight that allow a scene to remain “natural” whilst drawing the eye to certain features: the blush of lipstick or the topping of a pizza or the heat of a barbecue, and so on.    

Nor are the images confined to the gallery building and its little courtyard. Blip has placed a quartet of large format pieces outside of the gallery, within its grounds so that they might be viewed through the gallery’s windows. These give the exhibition a unique additional perspective, making it appear as if we’re are viewing the exhibition from within itself.

Expressive and full of colour and life, Exaggerations is another eye-catching and engaging exhibition from Blip.

SLurl Details

• Andante Gallery (Amityville, rated Adult)

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

In 2021 Titus Palmira, Sofie Janic and Megan Prumier opened a region build called Skrunda-2, an interpretation of a deserted Soviet-era military base and town built by Russia in Latvia during the 1960s for the operation of their Destnr early warning radar system, before eventually abandoning it in the 1990s.

It was a popular build, attracting photographers and bloggers alike (see Skrunda-2 an atmospheric slice of Soviet history in Second Life), as did its successor (see; Skrunda: the returning in Second Life). One of the latter is Blip Mumfuzz, an artist / photographer with a gifted eye and an ability to create images that are so natural in angle and composition, they sit as scenes we might naturally sport for ourselves when visiting a place – as she richly demonstrates with Images of Skrunda, now open at Frank Atisso’s, Art Korner.

Set within an environment suggestive of a deserted town with slab-like blocks rising from all sides that stand as reminders of the blockhouse-like bulk of the great apartment buildings of Skrunda, and surrounded by ruins the offer a further echo of their study, these are genuinely remarkable images. Through a considered use of focal length, focus, and angle, Blip presents pieces that are so life-like in composition they might actually have been taken within the aged, deserted remnants of Skrunda itself, whilst they also offer a unique sense of place and time entirely of their own.

Take Skrunda Drone, for example: it is hard to to imagine one is looking out from a high vantage point across a run-down corner of a township. Meanwhile, it is hard not to look at Skrunda Dream and not feel one can walk into it and take a peek through the open door or climb the rusting steps up to the gangways above, and onwards among the gantries and tanks; similarly, Skrunda-3 12 gives the impression one can hop onto the old rails and walk along them, following the railcar that appears to be vanishing around the bend in the tracks that sits between graffiti-painted buildings.

This is another genuinely engaging collection from a gifted photographer and storyteller that helps to recall a genuinely engaging Second Life region build.

SLurl Details

• Images of Skrunda, Art Korner (Deju, rated Moderate)