… I was straight away struck by the gorgeous chocolate/gold palette…
… the cute golden star canopy is impossible to ignore, and below is another Cica Ghost world filled with wonderful critters…
… both big…
… and small…
… there’s a much greater feeling of wide-open space here, compared to her other stuff. I also found the whole thing feels more ‘industrial’ than her previous worlds, still very organic, but, somehow, more industrial, almost ‘Steampunk’, even, though only very loosely, and filtered through Cica Ghost’s wonderful mind… perhaps ‘Surreal Steampunk’?…
… I never leave one of her worlds without checking the shore, out. I managed to find a tiny island, a little way from the shore…
… where I could delight in the star canopy meeting the horizon.
Over the last 3 days I’ve been exploring the wonderful Home & Garden Expo 2021. There’s something here for pretty much everyone, apart from the hardcore yucky element in SL, and, who knows, perhaps there’s yucky stuff here, too, but I didn’t see any, which was really nice, because I do get sick of seeing that infantile shit. There’s beautiful, reverent stuff…
… and crazy, silly stuff…
… there’s a plethora of fabulous elements for your garden…
… there’s musical instruments you can try and buy, there are horses you can ride before you decide if you need a horsey…
… there’s art…
… I’ve never explored one of these expo’s so systematically/thoroughly, before, but I don’t remember ever seeing much art in them, before. I could be wrong, probably am, but there seemed to be much more art for sale in this expo…
… there’s all manner of adorable cuteness to see, here, too.
I always find these shows far too big and confusing to ever explore them as thoroughly as I did this one, I always get lost, and eventually just give up. The reason I was able to so systematically explore this one was thanks to Annie Brightstar’s wonderful blog. She has a post, there, where she has provided SLURL’s for every part of the expo. Whenever I got lost, which was often, I’d just look at that post and pick the next TP, it was super-helpful…
… the highlight of the show, for me, was to be there for the traditional launching of the paper lanterns. I think this is only the second time I’ve witnessed one of these events. I joined a handful of avi’s on a rooftop, and we all watched in delight…
… as these pretty things guttered there way up into the the darkness…
… slowly spiralling higher…
… and higher…
… carrying whatever meaning they had been imbued with…
… till, one by one, they flickered out, and vanished.
Today I took possession of shop 101 in the little village of Wythburn…
… while I liked the walls, I felt the overall feel was a bit old-world…
… Sethos Lionheart, the charming sim manager, was more than happy to change the decor so it was more to my liking. I have to say, I have rented a few gallery spaces, in the past, and have never encountered such personal, friendly service, before. Sethos made me feel like I was already a valued member of the little artist community, here…
… my first step is always to set out the most important aspect of the space: the canvases…
… followed by some furniture and carpet…
… and, of course, plants…
… finally, the work. These five images are the latest in my current progression of ‘imaginary landscapes’…
… it’s always wonderful to see them this big…
… I’m really enjoying creating these works…
… which you can see for yourself in Placebo Gallery 101, in Wythburn Village, Thirlmere (:
When I visited the Raven Crag Art Center, recently, I determined to come back and check out the whole sim, Thirlmere, which looked interesting at a quick glance. Yesterday, I came back to do just that. Not far from the gallery is Wythburn Village, a little village built around a small lake. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered that almost every building in this little village is an art gallery…
… with some wonderful work on display…
… this one was my favourite!…
… next to the village, and around the lake, is a sweet wilderness area…
… with little woodland cuties peeking out from the trees…
… a winding dirt road to follow…
… with a little stone bridge over a stream…
… the road leads you to a gazebo in a clearing with all kinds of cuteness inside. For you horsey folk, there is equestrian transport, should you choose not to walk. There’s also an underground area to explore. I liked it here so much, I am in the process of renting one of the little gallery spaces. That will probably be the subject of my next post (:
I visited the ‘Natural History Museum of Vienna‘, this morning. It’s many years since I was here last, but it’s not changed much. I don’t think the Bryn Oh exhibition was here, then, she wasn’t very famous when I was here last, though, I could be wrong, and it may have been here; that’s how long ago I visited here, though, so long ago it’s all a bit vague*. This is a very old-SL-style build, three dimensional aspects represented by two dimensional images applied to the faces of prims. This looks delightfully dated, now, but has, for me, the same appeal as remembering what sound sounded like from a valve radio (yes, my human remembers that)…
… it’s worth a visit here, just for the hallucinogenic optics of the place. Several of the rooms aren’t actually ‘rooms’ with 3D objects and real (SL-real) dimensions, they are actually photographs that you step into. This is a wonderfully, though odd, trippy experience…
… you step from a prim faceted reality, into a very weird, slightly disorienting visual illusion. I have no idea how these rooms are actually constructed, just that it’s pointless trying to adjust your ‘hover height’ to cope with the sudden experience of hovering above everything. As you move into a room, your mind kind of compensates for the disparity of the visuals, and it all begins to feel right…
… the rooms themselves are a delight. Being photos of real museum rooms, they feel incredibly like every such room my human has ever been in, right down to their gorgeously fusty datedness. The human has found that every museum environment it has ever experienced was stunningly modernised… 25 years earlier!…
… the dinosaurs are out in the actually constructed rooms. These beasties are obvious labours of painstaking craftsmanship. This Diplodocus is 157 prims! All the skeletons have similar prim counts, which is probably why most of the building itself is just textures on flat prims…
… there are some lovely wall displays…
… to inspire wonder and thought…
… but I have to confess to becoming fixated on the more hallucinogenic aspects of the place. At times I felt like I was Alice, and this was Wonderland, which, I guess, is a fine way to feel in a museum…
… climbing to the roof was like emerging into the set for ‘Inception‘…
… Inception meets Alice in Wonderland. When photography is your passion in SL, you soon notice that SL has very strange visual dynamics, very similar to video game visual dynamics… perspective is very plastic in SL. On the roof of the Natural History Museum of Vienna, the rules of perspective crash into the rules of reality, including backward inscriptions on the building face…
… I loved it!…
… careful cropping can get interesting results…
… less careful cropping gets even more interesting results (:
*Annie Brightstar kindly informed me that Bryn Oh’s installation was there, 11 years ago. Just as well I know not to trust my defective memory (:
I visited Where Our Journey Begins, this morning. This is a very conventional, scenic sim, no fantasy trees, here. When they are well done, I love these kinds of sims as much as I love the whimsical ones…
… which isn’t to say there isn’t the odd touch of whimsy, here, too…
… this is a lovely place to explore, plenty of delightful little scenes to discover…
… hidden vistas to find…
… being an island, it has many delightful coastal spots…
… where you can relax and breath in the sea air, listening to the wheeling seabirds, and talking to the more friendly ones.
Avatar Life 