Local Brooklyn Journalist Alanna Martinez interviewed Selavy Oh at Brooklyn is Watching yesterday for her upcoming story in the Williamsburg / Greenpoint Arts and News. We’ll post a link to it here as soon as its released, which i’m told is likely to be sometime next week.
SLART, an art in SL online and RL magazine made BIW (and particularly Nebulosus Severine’s “I’m Sorry Dad” which is talked about on podcast 15) a featured pick on their site.
comments on flickr– i’m too tired to write a whole blog post about this but i want to know… going to bed.
I really am floored when i look back over this amazing archive, part on and part two, assembled by anaamakatva Schor in the past couple months. Since he found the project he’s been taking pictures, many of them very beautiful, or funny, of pretty much everything that has happened at BiW. Looking back I can remember all the things that people were saying and thinking in the gallery when these various objects were around.
Artists of BIW, i just want to say thank you for everything so far and I can’t wait to see what is next. I remember Don saying to me when we got the screen installed “what if no body does anything at all?” and I told him “don’t worry”– basically– i was telling him “if we build it, they will come” and damn have y’all come… and seen and conquered! Its totally amazing.
At its heart Solar Flare is a painting, which I thought was OK but nothing really special. But instead of presenting it on a flat canvas, the artist has broken the surface into multiple planes and put bright colors on the exposed sides of the planes, which makes the whole thing look a bit like a demented Rubik’s Cube. The painting has some of the same bright colors that appear on the edges, but for me that wasn’t enough to make me feel a connection between the two things; instead, the multiplane thing just seemed like a gimmick intended to artificially create interest in a painting that would just get ignored in a more conventional presentation.
Perhaps going further with the Rubik’s Cube idea would have made the piece more effective. Instead of presenting the whole painting on the front, could moving some of it to side faces add more interest, and perhaps comment in some way on the base image? I’m not sure that such a technique would add anything to this image, but there might be some territory to explore there.
When I checked out the spoonertastic creator name on this work, my first reaction is that it was probably a griefer drop. A bit of cultural background… my understanding is that the C word is only a moderate insult on the east side of the pond, but here in the US many women consider it one of the most offensive words in the language. (I’m not among them; I’m in the camp that is trying to reclaim it as a positive word, just like the lovely body part that it names. But the avatar name still made me suspicious.) CickMy Lunt has been in SL for more than a year and a half, belongs to multiple groups including Arthole, and I met him and talked for a bit; I satisfied myself that this is a real work to be reviewed.
So enough sexual politics; how about the art? The candy castle is a charmingly childlike riot of bright colors; you’ll see lollipops, sugar dots, and various other candies in the build. Inside the castle he treats us to rainbow-swirled crayon posts for a throne and bright pink animals, and there is a copy of Candyland (the children’s game) set out on a table. Surrounding it is a moat, with the Kool-Aid man tipped over spilling red liquid into it. And the whole thing is topped by a gigantic sculptie kiss.
Next to the castle, CickMy has a giant boombox that plays short loops of familiar popular music. The loops are also his creation, and he has done a good job of getting the cuts right so that the loops sound seamless. There is also an information box out front that you can buy for L$0; it contains a short notecard about the castle, and a free party cat (also the artist’s work).
I really enjoyed the playful nature of this castle. It might have made a nice accompaniment to playground space, but that is gone now.
I took an astronomy class in college last year, so this one really appealed to my geeky nature. It has six cones that appear to spin (I believe it’s actually texture animation, as that can be started up and then it runs smoothly and automatically in the viewer); each of the cones has a different astronomical view. In front of the cones, there is a plane with six holes; you look through the holes to see the spinning cones, and you get the illusion of a rotating star field as you might see it through a telescope, except that the real ones don’t spin anywhere near as quickly. (The conic shape becomes nearly impossible to see when you’re looking at it straight on.) At a distance you can get the illusion that all six cones are really rotating star discs; up closer the angles throw off that effect, so you can only get that illusion for one or two cones at a time.
Viewing from the side and back are also interesting, though neither presents the same sort illusion of being something other that what it is. I didn’t perceive any great meaning here, just an attempt to present the beauty of celestial views and play with an illusion of perception. But that was enough.
In the picture the stargrid viewer is partially obscured by Juria’s latest installation, which appears to be unnamed. I didn’t feel that either piece was intended as a comment on the other; it’s just the sort of thing that happens occasionally in a crowded space like Brooklyn is Watching.