I spent the morning installing a new exhibition at Placebo Gallery. The exhibition is called ‘Imaginary Landscapes’, and consists of my eight latest works, where I have further explored one of my favourite themes, landscapes created from textures…
… although there are actual RL landscape elements incorporated in my textures, most are not landscape elements, in themselves, rather, they are photographs of concrete, sand, plants, clouds, rust, timber… all blended and mixed and reblended, till I weave them into these wonderful, rich, fantasy landscapes…
… they are landscapes from my mind, distant shores of the imagination, where you might find the ruins of civilisations vanished millennia ago…
… places where there are three suns and five moons…
… where there may be life, but not as Jim would know it…
… places you could spend the rest of your years exploring, not quite sure how you arrived there, in the first place. Something about looking at some pictures in a gallery?
Today I visited The Land of Thor, specifically to look at an exhibition in the Midgard Gallery, that Inara Pey had recently blogged about…
… the images in this exhibition are some of the freshest, truely delightful works I have seen in SL for a long time…
… really sweet whimsy…
… wonderfully engaging imagery that manages to totally avoid the cliched feel of a lot of this type of work I see in SL…
… I really loved all the rabbi-centric (my own word (: ) images in this exhibition…
… upstairs was an equally fresh set of work based on J G Ballard’s, then, ground-breaking novel ‘Crash’…
… if you’ve ever read the book, you’ll see the connection. However, having found ‘Crash’ to be Ballard’s least engaging novel, I find these works to be a much less grim depiction of the theme… if you didn’t know they were a homage to the eroticisation of auto-accident injuries, you’d find them quite joyous.
I visited the Vordun Museum and Gallery, last evening. I haven’t been here since their ‘Floating World’ exhibition, some time last year, or possibly even the year before. The Vordun is a very elegant gallery, very much like an RL ‘High Art’ gallery. The only thing I don’t like about it is the fact they force a HUD on you, as you enter… there’s no request, it’s just forced on you, and I find this gross lack of etiquette to be strangely at odds with the otherwise very sophisticated environment. I find it so invasive and irritating that I instantly remove it and anything it may have had to offer me, so, in that respect, it’s totally counterproductive of them to force it on me in the first place. Ok, I just needed to say that…
… the gallery is beautifully designed, the spaces are mostly quite intimate, and wonderfully visual…
… by which I mean the spaces themselves are visual, not just the art works that are in them…
… the works are displayed on various, perfectly coloured walls, with excellent lighting…
… the works are all old masters. You can buy many of them in the gallery shop, so I’m assuming they are all in the ‘Creative Commons’, otherwise selling them would be copyright infringement… I’ve seen plenty of that, as far as selling ‘Art’ goes, in SL, but would assume a gallery as obviously dedicated to a ‘High Art’ aesthetic as the Vordun, wouldn’t be selling work it shouldn’t be selling…
… the art works themselves are gorgeous reproductions, with deep, rich colours…
… there is a wide variety of mediums, from oils, to woodblock and etching…
… and even paired themes, like above, where there is a display of works depicting people playing instruments, alongside a beautiful display of classical and Renaissance instruments.
I visited The Lost Unicorn Gallery today, to check out the new work there. As always, the work is excellent. Many of these have gorgeous clothing on the models as a feature…
… really pretty, lush gowns…
… I loved this one’s Pre-Raphaelite style and palette…
… and this is simply beautiful in every way…
… this appealed for it’s palette, but also because I’m silly for felines…
… this was probably my favourite…
… and I loved the lighting in this one. These are just a few of the new works there, well worth a visit, as it always is.
I visited Idun, today. This is a sci-fi planet sim, with mostly sci-fi structures set in an otherwise untouched wilderness. The structures are great, nicely done. They get more prevalent as you climb higher from the landing point. It wasn’t the structures that stole my attention, though, it was the gorgeous scenery…
… and the wonderful sky. From the highest points, this scenery is panoramic and beautiful…
… but it was the lower landscape that I really loved. Everywhere you look, there are stunning scenes of the far distance framed by the near landscape…
… and above it all, that gorgeous sky. I explored what I think was every nook, down here…
… taking hundreds of photos…
… till I finally came to the ocean. It was incredibly restful, down here, with the waves washing onto the shore.
Today I visited Cica Ghost’s latest creation, Planet. As I’ve said, previously, I have always had an ambiguousness about my reactions to Cica Ghost’s work, sometimes liking it, sometimes not…
… I really like this one. For some reason, this one feels different to me. It still has all the Cica Ghost tropes…
… but they seem fresher, in ‘Planet’, as though some subtle evolution has taken place…
… which is hardly a surprise, given how prolific she’s been recently…
… the thing that has always caused my ambivalence toward her work is that I’ve always found her creatures to be on the creepy side of cute… I found them too unsettling to be enjoyable…
… I don’t feel that with the critters in ‘Planet’, they are suddenly likeable, which, for me, gives them far more depth, and makes the whole work a comfortable experience, not an unsettling one…
… I also particularly like the sky here…
… it has an ‘epic’ quality, it makes me think of 1950’s Chinese and Russian propaganda poster backgrounds.
Over the last few days I’ve been visiting Whiskey Smash. I first was drawn to this destination because I saw it was advertised as a place that was about ‘art and blah blah’, art is one of my passions, and I always seek it out in SL. The ‘blah blah’ part was about music and dj’s, something I do not seek out in SL. It’s taken me days to assemble these pictures, because the first time I tp’d in, I landed smack in the middle of a frenzied crowd of dancing avi’s. If you know me, you won’t be surprised that my instant reaction was to tp home…
… determined not to give up, I came back the next day to a, thankfully, empty dance space. I then began my exploration of the sim, usually fighting industrial level lag. To say this sim is an eclectic collection of building genres and styles is gilding the lily, it actually borders on being a total mess, it’s quite hard to get a shot that encompasses only one style. There is little to no art, unless you count the various statues around the place, I didn’t find a single gallery, which is what the term ‘art’ generally leads me to expect. This sim is purely about dj’s, dance spaces, and shopping. That being said, if you spend the time, you can get some nice pictures…
… the second-to-last time I visited, the dance space was, again, pumping, but they’d moved the landing point outside, so I didn’t arrive in the middle of them, which was considerate. The place is obviously popular for dancing, but in the whole time I was exploring, I never saw a single other avi…
… my favourite aspect of Whiskey Smash is the sky…
… which is the only really consistent aspect among an incredible mixture of disparate styles…
… offering endless permutations of aurora-like fluctuations…
Following my visit, yesterday, to Memento Mori, with Witchy, I have become slightly obsessed with the place, and came back to spend the kind of time you can only spend alone, here, which is different to the time spent showing a friend around…
… but it was the lovely time spent here with Witchy that piqued my interest, here. She had wondered what was below this build, something I’d never bothered to find out. As I’ve recently said, here, I have an almost pathological aversion to being led… this causes me, or has done, till just recently, to automatically dismiss unsolicited notices that pop up in my HUD, or anywhere else, for that matter, without even glancing at them. Because of this, I see places in SL through my own, uninformed filter, which has always suited me fine… but I’m realising I’ve missed out on a lot of important information because of my wilfulness. I had no idea, till today, that Chouchou is a group, a duo…
… a duo that is basically a piano and vocals. This explains the significance of the piano, here, in Memento Mori…
… they have several albums in iTunes, which I have been listening to whilst I sorted/edited the images for this post. While I was at Memento Mori I listened to the gorgeous music that plays here. That’s another thing I’ve never done, listened to the music streams in SL… I have extremely selective tastes, and seldom hear anything in the way of music selections that holds much interest for me, so I just never, in 11 years, listened to music streams here, once I realised I found most of them too dull. So, last evening with Witchy, was the first time I’d listened to the music, here, which is totally part of the experience, silly Seri!…
… the music, and the stunning complexity of the architecture, here, is a kind of meditation experience, it’s very easy to just let go and be delighted…
… before I came back here, this morning, I checked out the other Chouchou sims/builds, all delightful and, not surprisingly, well patronised…
… I think they all, as with this place, have a special HUD you can wear that gives you a cinematic view of what you are seeing. I found that view very acceptable, but, as it didn’t translate into my photo’s, and was kind of slow and awkward, I didn’t use it for more than a few minutes… but, at least I tried it, which I flatly would not have done, even yesterday…
… so, coming here, yesterday, with Witchy, has proved a kind of epiphany for me…
… perhaps not quite a spiritual experience, although this place sure brings those kind of feelings out, but definitely a reframing of my SL experience. I managed to get up on this staircase with a bit of athleticism that defied the ‘no fly’ rules, here, to be able to look all the way down to the piano…
… the only aspect of this build I don’t like is the odd glow on the bell, but, hey, the rest is amazing.
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