Metamorphosis

My friend Bacon Rolls has a show at the SL Museum of Contemporary Art, which is well worth seeing. Here is the introduction I wrote for the show.

The challenge of creating SL art from RL originals is not simply a matter of uploading images to hang in virtual galleries. The uploaded pictures filling so many SL galleries are in truth no more than copies – they are not the real thing. Bacon Rolls has created a bridge between “real” and “virtual” art, with bold, large-scale works which are both original to SL and explicitly based on the forms of his RL work, by translating his RL paintings into SL sculptures, and back again. This exhibition demonstrates the stages of this translation process in a series of images and sculptures that display consistency and variety.

Bacon’s RL paintings of land- and seascapes form both the inspiration and the raw material for his SL work. He translates the textures of his RL paintings into SL sculpties, abstracting their qualities of form and colour, and providing their surface appearance. Greens and blues predominate, evoking the colours of the original paintings. Bacon combines the pictures with their SL sculptie counterparts to create strikingly beautiful images that break out of the flat space that confined them in RL – echoing the work of RL artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg in exploring the relationship between two and three dimensions. This being Second Life, they can also defy gravity.

Bacon carries the process of translation further, downloading snapshot images of his Second Life creations, modifying them and then loading them back into Second Life for display as two-dimensional pictures which are clearly related to the RL landscapes they are derived from and yet have their own identity as abstract representations of the SL landscape.