Life is but a Dream

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Traditional       

 Noke Yuitza had some good news. Even in IM, her merry enthusiasm was infectious. It was the perfect melding of SL and real life. The birth of a new life. It is a very beautiful story, let me tell you it because it is attached in a certain way to this installation. They met in one of my classes some years ago here in SL; they are from different countries, Germany and Sweden, and I introduced them. I met them in RL too. They started to going out in RL and now they are together and with a baby!!

          She broke the news at Arte Libera where her new install, Dreams, opens on Monday, February 17 at 1.30pm SLT. It's a beautiful composition with a great, dreamy, moon-like face looking down on two slumbering forms. Are they parts of the same psyche or is it the concrete in search, among the shadows of the subconscious, of the ephemeral? A fantasy of undergrowth invites further meditation, searching, grasping, reaching for the moon. Why shouldn't you? You deserve it, and some, as we have seen, have found it. The build hints at a warning, too. How beautiful the slumberers, if more than one they be. Could this be a fate we risk submitting to, an endless dive into an impossible reality, only touched by nebulous forms that must needs vanish when we awake?
Noke Yuitza:  Their love story is attached in certain way to this installation because Dream talks about the necessity of love and be loved of the human beings. That hole that we have that we try to fill with the other person. So we Dream with our need to feel love and to give love and we feel the absence of the other.

Noke Yuitza:  Arte Libera means a lot for me, especially the job Simba does. We have known each other since 2009 and she has become much more that just a gallerista - although she's a good one! Simba and also other members of Arte Libera (as Wiz, Storm, Grazie, Gatta, Moki,...) they has become also part of my art pieces. quite literally. One example was Tears in the Rain installation, but before that was the SandMan and also in my first installation. Simba posed for one of my grid pictures. How many people do that? She was the one I came back to in SL after a year of not being in Second Life, when I exhibited 'Tears'. Arte Libera is a very great community because it's a collaborative one.
simba Schumann: It's great to cooperate with people who have the same feelings.  I met Noke many years ago. She has done many shows for Arte Libera, and we work together in perfect harmony. I fell in love with her ​​creativity that I have seen her grow over time. A few months ago she told me that she had not been successful in getting a LEA sim. It seemed a shame, because she has always avant garde ideas. So I thought it would be good to have her at Arte Libera, which has be underutilized recently. I gave her carte blanche, I knew she would come up with something good. And here it is!

          It's nice to be back in the familiar hortus conclusus of Arte Libera. Even the gate is the same. So many artists have exhibited on this platform over the past  - what, five years? - it feels like an island of sanity among the craziness of SL. Noke talks about a trinity imagery, but the build suggests far older pagan imagery; the henge and the altar; the tree connecting life, the overworld and the underworld and all the dreams in the world, and time in which to dream them. Hands lurk in the undergrowth, are they sown there, like tares, or are they the true grain, or a grain of truth? Reaching, hoping, searching for something to hold on to, a whole in this world of half realities.

          There had been some talk of Arte Libera disappearing for good, and we're all glad that hasn't happened, not least of all because of the importance of non-LEA venues for artists. But hey, it's also very nice to come back to a familiar place after years. Kudos to the folks of Solaris for giving it some space. So much of SL is transient, the familiar pillars at Arte Libera are a reminder that some things don't change, whatever may happen in real life. We ought to appreciate that more, because consistency doesn't happen by chance. there's a lot of effort behind the running of a venue. (I think it's OK to stare at Noke, her mermaidish a/o is mesmerizing.)

Noke Yuitza: Yeah. Not all people see how hard it is, doing stuff here. It demands time, right Simba?
simba Schumann: Yes, and willpower; this is a period in my life that my energies are in my RL job, but SL teaches me a lot.
            Real life comes first! for there it is that so many of the dreamlike creations of SecondLife are first half imagined. But of course it's a balance, a rhythm, a cycle. And a lot of rapid eye movement.
Noke Yuitza: It must be that way or SL eats you!  I use Second Life mainly for RL purposes: 2008- 2010 for a RL project of science dissemination and since 2009 I've used some art stuff here for work at in college. But Simba is one of the few people here that has done a hobby like a real passion. Not too many projects survive the effect of time.
simba Schumann: When you work in SL, you do it for passion, you can do only what you like, and you have to do well what you love, so... perhaps it's a way to fill the same hole of Noke's dream. There will be passion!
Dream  by Noke Yuitza is at simba Schumann's Arte Libera  on sim Solaris, starting tomorrow.