Out of the blue

Fuschia Nightfire has done it again, with a lovely install in the sky above the Tanalois group gallery, better known as the  Torno Kohime Foundation , of course, in honour of that lovely patron of the arts.
Fuschia calls this one Water Music, and the discrete sections of the build, piano, ballerina, and crashing waves. This is a hybrid build. You can enjoy most of it even in a non-mesh friendly viewer, and still have all the hilarity of seeing people wearing odd boxes on their head. But you'll miss these horses, if you do.

Water music, in Fuschia's masterful build, means the fluidity of the body in movement,  liquid notes in a melody, and the percussion of hooves beating on the beach.
Fuschia Nightfire:  It's really a bit of mishmash that I threw together. The horse is my first mesh sculpture upload, and took me ages to make, so I didn't have time to work on much new stuff for this show.
Modest as always, her apparently simple approach reveals more layers than perhaps she knows.

It's a swirling, lively, yet pacific-chilly build, the icy elements set off nicely against a dark background. In this Italian gallery horses and waves were never more appropriately conjoined, than these 'cavalloni bianchi che si inseguono nel mare'   as Baglioni would say.

But it is the piano that is the star of the show. Walk up the cascading keyboard, linger on a chord or two.

Fushia hereself, resplendent in greeny blues, welcomed us all and in her lovely down to earth way, continued to thing of ways she might just tweak the build a little more. A true artist.
RAG Randt, who's currently getting to grips with mesh, admired the build very much.
RAG Randt: Fuschia is one of the most innovative artists I know.
He's right. The wonderful Tani Thor and Aloisio Congrejo find themselves once again with a splendid build on their land.  My only question - in all this blue, where's the fuschia?

Rain of thought

Who says recycling don't pay.
Machinimist and artist Ian Pahute is rocking the foggers on his sim Isles Las Avies (hmm... deliberately bilingual, or just an anagraphic balls-up by the Lindens?) with his composition, The Loneliness of Being.
This is some random guy, I always feel sorry for people stuck with Resident as a last name, don't you? This dude doubly so; he'd managed to miss-spell the word 'Wisdom' in his name. That has to hurt his chance of dating the moderately unchallenged. Meditating on blogs and Twitter, especially SL generated material of that kind, is like eating Pringles, you probably should get a grip and cut back your intake.
Anyway for some reason this instal has been spammed by the login screen. *Has Ian been comin' on strong to unnamed Lindens?? More in a Tweet later*.

You saw this a couple of years back, at the Identity exhibition at Caerleon, floating above a very impressive set of dioramas by Fuschia Nightfire in a cupola built by FreeWee Ling. Now, the same, yet eternally different, build is floating over an attractive bay.

Lonely, the Tweeter? Surely not. Lonely people have no outlet for their minutiae, that's the whole point, isn't it? I suppose he's got me thinking, after all.
The cloud of words, outpourings recycled, a rain-of-thought. Not to be mist?

Ess Ell

...went to bed single, and woke up double...

Saskia Boddeke, The Story of Susa Bubble

Sex sells, in all worlds; you only have to go to Zindra or to the many BDSM sims of OSGrid to see that, and hey, you clicked on this link, didn't you? Perhaps in no other field of human endeavour does Sod's Law of Inverse Proportion more poignantly apply; the more a person talks about it, the more you know they're not getting good quality action at home. Where does that leave virtual nookie, then?

The new show at ZaZu'Z gallery, raises as many questions as it answers on that score. It's a small show, in a gallery with an earthbound, West Coast commercial lanai look; discreet, almost anonymous, with a little cloud of trash circling the entrance.

But ZaZu is no trailer trash masseuse.  The perfectly-put-together avatar with a French twist and photounrealistic skin sends the mind racing to transgenderrational conclusions, of course, but she takes her work seriously, in every way. People were making some pretty raunchy remarks, as they strolled among the larger than lifesize canvesses, but she let none of that get to her. No nipple police here, no strident voices, none of the hypocrisy of the art community.
ZaZu Susa: Is there a SL art community? *smiles. The most stupid thing people say is "you use photoshop as well " because I don't, they are all snapshots, not staged images. As for the gallery, I have made several. This one I built for a very short time. The detail is important. The photographs are just a selection, I took thousands of pictures, while having sex in SL, so as to have this. I love all of them, I can't choose a favourite,  it depends of the day. I chose these ones first because they are good pictures, but they represent 6 months of work.

In an environment where the word 'fantasy' takes on vivid, vivacious forms, these photographs are orthodox,  even old fashioned; like Marilyn, ZaZu's lovely avie has the same anatomy as other women. Serving and being served, she is firmly portrayed as subject, never object, in compositions more tasteful than explicit, if a little repetitive. There are few surprises, except perhaps the one with the Doberman. A wet nose in the frame  raises the question of censorship and sensibility.
ZaZu Susa: I don't have limits, when it comes to my art. It just has to be a good picture. If someone wants to think this is tacky - well, art is made of tacky things. RP sex is a huge part of SL! You don't make art with cute things or maybe, not me. Most people don't say anything when they look at my art. I think the biggest compliment they pay me is to purchase one piece.
It's hard to say, looking in from the outside, what it means to share these fragrant fragments of a virtual sexlife. Like all art, the meaning intended and the message conveyed remain, as the protagonists on the virtual bed, inseparably locked in a shared isolation, and in that, we each grasp what beauty we can find.

Do what

Where do the days go.
Three bits of random news:
Anybody who lost their spot in Milly Sharple's gallery, which closed this week, may want to have a word with the Space 4Art team. The sim will open on St. Paddy's day, 17 March, so IM Asmita Duranaya, ChapTer Kronfeld or Migina Miklos and grab your spot soon. They'll be offering 24 places to artists, each one will get a 50 prim studios for the same low rates that Milly was charging (like L150 a month, I believe).
Chantal Harveyis very excited about a big fat prize being offered for machinima - 3,000 Australian dollars and a chance to have your name bandied about at the Casula Powerhouse Gallery near Sydney, Australia, and, who knows, even LA. It's The 48HFP *think bright lights*. Once you've assembled your team and forked out the $48 entry fee, what's the hardest part of making a machinima?
Chantal Harvey: Hmmm.... having a good eye, telling a story, and filming in a way that people do not notice it is machinima.
What an amazing opportunity. The whole thing has to be done in 48 hours, by the way. But you can start thinking now, because you're meant to actually 'do' it from March 30 to April 1. Try not to fry your graphics card, and promise, if you win, not to go banging on about how 30 billion people saw your film in Shanghai. Or if you do, expect to be mocked mercilessly.
Oh that's right, the days went on recouping and then publishing a new magazine about music, for Virtual Music Services. Our first issue was carved entirely from articles composed of platitudes and the personal pronoun - or at least, that's what it felt like at the time. To go, in just ten days, from nothing to published was a steep learning curve, but Scribus is fun, and all the real credit goes to Wythe Wrexan for putting the magazine on Issuu, and to Jay Hurikan for paying us to have fun griping and learning.

If you know a bit about music in SL, are capable of composing a sentence without mentioning yourself every third word, and want to make a couple of Linden, IM Jay.
This room needs a good area rug.