Saturday, May 22, 2010

9 @ Twilight

The follow is an updated press release from our curator Kerry Streeter:

Twilight Art Gallery opened a new group installation, "9 @ Twilight," with a wide range of artists, Sunday, May 9, from 6:30 to 9:00 pm, SL time. Musical entertainment was provided by DJ Calli (Callipygian Christensen) spinning jazz vocals, followed by Ichie Kamachi with her glorious voice interpreting a range of jazz and blues favorites.

Contact Kerry Streeter for information, tours, or interviews, inworld by notecard or at kerrystreeter at gmail.com. Descriptions of work in the show, most written by the artists themselves (if in quotation marks), are given below. Please credit the artists if quotations are used in publications or blogs.

participating artists:

Samara Barzane
Fran Benoir
Callipygian Christensen
Pol Jarvinen
Tegan Jenvieve
Araminta Kroitschov
Yesod Scholessinger
Kerry Streeter
Trill Zapatero


Samara Barzane creates inner worlds from outer landscapes, collaging tiny bits and scraps of her RL photographs, manipulating them in Photoshop, and reconstructing impressionistic views: "I always have wondered what to do with my hundreds of images taken on my journeys in the US and elsewhere. They were occasionally shared on a web forum or on a blog, but otherwise they sat on my hard drive gathering the virtual version of dust... I honestly don't know how it started -- perhaps I saw another artist's photomontages. ...I pulled together a group of images from my last London visit that I thought were graphically interesting and started to layer and process them in Photoshop. The original impulse was graphic, but it wasn't long before I realized that it was my memories I was layering and that the process, just as memory changes as it is covered by other memories, was also altering more than the image."

Fran Benoir has been active as a RL electronic media artist for many years: "As Fran Benoir, I was quickly attracted to the art scene around Cetus District and began creating kinetic art that draws on my love of layering and immersion. The freedom that Second Life physics offers is very exciting. I have been juxtaposing textures and modifying scripts to add motion to create art that can only exist in the virtual world. Streams in the early Maine spring, under ground rivers from the Yucatan, shadows on the beach merge together in semi transparent layers to form digital constructions that are similar to my physical work but with the immersive quality of my digital work."


Callipygian Christensen, "shooting a variety of subjects, uses SL snapshots to document her view of the Second Life we lead. Calli displays some unretouched images, but the passion for making these images look as 'real' as possible also means the use of Photoshop to remove ugly angles and texture blurs caused by SL animation and movement, and to enrich the depth and tone of SL colours in others. Calli has won Best in Show awards in numerous juried SL arts contests and Fan Favourite ballots."


"Pol Jarvinen was born and lives in Southwestern France between the Pyrenees Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.... His early sculpture is characterized by a play of forms and colors, fluid curving and intersecting lines and shapes that invite viewer participation. Over time his work has become more interactive. He plays with prims to make his thoughts and dreams become reality, interweaving a wide spectrum palette of colors and textures to achieve his interior vision. He loves playing with transparency and with unfolding layers of meaning and personal experience. The viewer can move within the artwork, gaining multiple levels of meaning."


Tegan Jenvieve approaches SL photography with a rich, lushly colored, immersive style that draws a viewer into mythological realms and complex narratives. Her intensely involving portraits and landscapes only deceptively seem like the best of all possible snapshots. Woven throughout is a discerning eye and a wonderful sense of the apt pose, the appropriate moment, the feelings hidden in a gesture. Her playful sculptures enhance the motion apparent in her still images.


Araminta Kroitschov is the avatar of professional artist Mary Yates. Her work on display involves manipulations of RL photographs which themselves evoke a carnivalesque expressionism: "All the work in this exhibit is related to fairy tales and cultural mythology. Each image is a composited series of digitally altered layers created from my original photographs. I like to think of each image as having a deep iconography not unlike a tarot deck or other symbolic visual system. I hope that the viewer will make their own associations with the images and realize a different understanding of the well known stories and myths depicted."


Yesod Scholessinger is a painter, collagist, and sculptor whose work exhibits abstract expressionist moods jostled by a Dadaist sense of humor. Some are scanned from RL while others are constructed in SL. Juxtaposed in one installation they create a sense of the traditional art world colliding and uneasily colluding with a purely virtual realm.


Kerry Streeter is best known for her edgy "second looks" RL photos exhibited at Chaos & Beauty, Crossworlds, Digital Eye, and of course Twilight. This is her first excursion into SL photography, a series of emotionally charged portraits. "I backed into SL photos inspired by Zanara Zenovka's erotic self portraits and the versatile, eclectic, sometimes disturbing vision of Callipygian Christensen. My work is random, accidental, born of those moments when something unexpected connects inner feelings with outer reality. The world, especially this one in its total artifice, is full of hidden shimmering meaning, which we only rarely perceive."


Trill Zapatero's large, intricate, hallucinatory canvases draw the eye ever further inward: "My paintings are travel collages or maps of journeys. I painted them while I was living in China, India and Malaysia. Viewing them might be as much like reading maps as looking at paintings, perhaps similar to watching animations.... The paintings are as much about dream journeys, and flights of the imagination as they are about the actual places they were painted.... Sometimes I set out with a few photos, images or ideas in mind.... Sometimes I use my own photos and either paint them or collage the printed paper- which I can then tear or glaze over or cut out neatly around an edge or contour.... What I’m looking for in my painting is some place to get to that is behind the surface, beyond the material nature of the painting and collage."

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Open and full of art.

The Twilight Art Museum and Gallery is open and full of a wonderful variety of Second Life and First Life art.

Monday, March 17, 2008

The Beginning

I wanted to create a large art museum in the grand classical style, which would not only show works for sale in a gallery section but would highlight unique works of art by more established figures in the museum section proper. The Twilight Art Museum & Gallery is currently looking for works to exhibit.