It's been a lovely gift...

Wizardoz Chrome is a famous videomaker who covers by her works most of SL art events.
I'm honored my latest exhibit Visioni at Ars Exhibendi gallery is now on one of her beautiful videos.
It's really a lovely gift to me!
Thank you Wiz, and my congrats for the video quality and elegance.
Happy to share it here:



(Enjoy it better here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0D-7viubfg)

A new exhibition: Visioni (Ars Exhibendi-MBI Gallery)

Rubin Mayo, very active owner of the gallery Ars Exhibendi - MBI, has given me another opportunity to show together the different kinds of creations I've been going making in SL.

After the exhibition Art Deco, at Art India Gallery (thanks to Quan Lavender), where I presented photos and furniture in that style, planning the exhibition "Visioni. Foto, oggetti, costruzioni fra passato e presente (Visions. Photos, objects, buildings between Past and Present) pushed me to think about the relationships between my passion for minimalist and retro photography, for Art Deco furniture and decor, for Art Deco architecture, for industrial and post-industrial landscapes and buildings.
The result of this reflections has been an exhibit that takes advantage from the 4 rooms gallery to organize my stuff around four themes, unified by the reference to the past.

The first room is dedicated to Simple lines. I show there both photos and furniture of some of my buildings and decorations, along with a selection from my minimalist photo's series.

I put here photos of the Paris 1900 Melu Deco shop and of the exhibition room at Art India Gallery, where my exhibit Art Deco has been hosted, both decorated according to that style, and two pictures of the LookElite Model Agency building, that I attempted to build and decorate in a luxurious 1940s style.  
The sign here below says how minimalism and Art Deco style have common features.

The following room is the Old Lights room: since Light and shadow are its theme, I've set up two crossing streets bordered by streetlamps (although one of their type is more a living room one). Their 1930s taste is recalled by a lot of the photos on the walls: SL is full of retro towns, much more beyond the best known ones, like 1920 Berlin or Paris 1900, or even Bay City.

Then, the Time Travels room: four corners decorated by famous designers' furniture (from Lalique to Gabriel) I have reproduced by prims and meshes or by my own design stuff. They are rounded by a photo serie called "Found in the Attic", photos of vintage clothes taken on RL retro backgrounds or taken at beautiful historical places of SL.

Finally, the room where I placed a model of the London Battersea Power Plant, the famous landmark of the British capital, built in the 1930s and now threatened by neglect and estate speculation. The SL side of my passion for industrial architecture is shown on this room's walls: 12 selected black and white photos from the huge archive I collected in my explorations of these fascinating virtual places.

Visit the exhibit: Ars Exhibendi - MBI

Urban Landscapes at Dryland (my latest photo exhibit)

After having pushed all SL photography lovers to experiment William Waevers's Phototools (Weaver's Project), Anita Witt created a wonderful place for artists (and not only for them), the desert of Dryland.
It's a SIM entirely covered by sand, where a few wrecks (ships, carriages, cars, UFO) peeks out from the dunes and two disrupted buildings talk about the humans who have been there.

 Entering these buildings is a surprise: they are art galleries, where artists (Anita first) show how life (in the form of art) can flower even on a desert and supposed death background.

It isn't the only sign of life there: among the dunes another artwork talks about life and fecondity. It's the huge Pallina 80's installation "Fertility" where symbols of life are mixed up to parts of a "machine of happiness", a red and yellow Circus that gives colors to the endless sand stretch.

The first exhibit the guest gallery has hosted has been dedicated to the SIM itself: Anita invited some photographers (I got the honor to be among them) to shoot the land. A feast for for minimalism lovers and a good challenge for photographers who tried to pull out "something" from the "Void".

It's been a great surprise to me when Anita invited me to make the second gallery's exhibition. Anita asked me for a selection of pictures about Urban Landscapes: another striking contrast with the desert that would host the show.

(Exhibition poster, by Anita Witt)

Cities are the horizon to almost all of us: even the wish of peaceful natural places that makes people building and hanging out at a lot of wonderful gardens and forests in SL is a sign of a deep relationship with cities. We love and hate narrow streets, crowdy avenues, tall buildings, streetlamps, metros, factories, power plants, stores and theaters, taxi and buses. It's our Heaven and our Hell. However, We can't ignore them, we can't avoid to be influenced by them, to desire its opportunities and to try improving their and our life there.
Cities are our way of life, since centuries. We can't think of our world without them. Neither a virtual world.

 

From Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927)

So, SL is full with cities, small and big, decayed or well ordered, on a river or on the seashore, among mountains or in the prairie... Some of them are copies of RL ones, some others forecast our hopes or our fears for the future, some others celebrate "happy old times". All of them have those shops, those streetlamps, those "nests" (our homes) we know and we love in RL. No matter if houses are poor and distressed, or lamps are gas or laser ones. Or even if buildings are Art deco, Victorian or Futurist ones. They are towns and cities, they are our own landscapes.
My photos try to catch some of the different meanings builders wanted to give to their creations: portraying large views of towns, focusing details, watching the former "pumping hearts" of the cities (factories and industries), showing the cities' past. Each floor of the exhibit is dedicated to one of these themes: views, details, industry, retro.
There are no humans in the pictures. This is because cities have their own life, different from the humans' one and different from the one they lives with humans. Cities are not stones, but residents wrote a scholar of a far past. I think cities are ALSO stones, living stones even without people crowding them. They are my pictures' protagonists.

 

I thank again Anita for the honor she wanted to give me and I wish everybody to enjoy the exhibition.

***

Exhibit will last through April

LM: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Mado/120/176/38

Some feedback to the exhibit on the web:

Apmel Goosson blog
http://apmel.blogspot.it/2013/03/melusina-parkins-urban-landscapes.html
http://apmel.blogspot.it/2013/03/magnificent-views-of-desolated-urban.html

Quan Lavender blog
http://quanlavender.blogspot.no/2013/03/urban-second-life.html

Ziki Questi blog
http://zikiquesti.blogspot.it/2013/03/melusina-parkin-at-dryland.html

   

A dream made real: my Art Deco Exhibition!

After one week from its opening, I want to keep memory of the exciting experience I'm living with my exhibit on Art Deco at Art India Gallery.

 When Quan Lavender, on behalf of the Gallery owned by Veekay Navarathna, invited me to show my Art Deco pics there, proposing me to add also my furniture in that style and to take care of a matching decor of the exhibition room, I've thought that my best dream was going to become real.
I work on Art Deco in SL since years: I've taken hundreds of pics of Art Deco places and buildings around the grid and I collected them in a Flickr set (most of them are only snapshots, don't think to find art photography there, it's only a documentary archive!), I started creating Art Deco furniture, founding the brand Melu Deco (a special thank for that, even after many years, to my beloved friends Laura18 Streeter and to Bety Dudek, who enthusiastically liked that name, and encouraged me to start up), I opened shops in almost all the best retro sims of SL, with the aim to enjoy their atmosphere.

Past and present: my first Melu deco shop at Bayou noir (New Years' Eve 2010) and the latest renewing of my Paris 1900 shop.

By the time, I studied that style more deeply in RL, reading books and websites, discovering great protagonists and wonderful creations (buildings, paintings, furniture, objects, jewels, movies, decorations, dresses...) and exciting - although slightly sad - stories about Art Deco masterpieces, like the Battersea Power Station in London, now abandoned and decayed...
My SL home's desk shows this work, through the mess of those book's virtual copies. My photostudio walls do the same, displaying my exhibit's signs.

The outcomes of all that have been some inworld talks at the late Virtual Museum of Architecture, articles on the great magazine Retropolitan, some exhibit called Second Deco (at Diotima Gallery), Past Future (at the Schloss Museum in 1920 Berlin) and Vintage Image (again at Diotima Gallery and at Seraph City First Bank), the display of Battersea Plant's prim model at the VMA, and the satifaction to see my furniture in many houses and apartments of retro style lovers, or in great public places (earlier at the former Modavia venue; lately, at the Sonatta Morales' main store library room at Vintage Retro, where that great designer made me the honor to set my Lulu table and chairs, inspired to a René Lalique design).

Library Room at Sonatta's Main Store at Vintage Retro

The Art India exhibition is now the landing point of this long travel.
I've built and decorated several spaces and buildings, in these years: apartments in Paris 1900 and 1920 Berlin, a vintage fashion show set for Donna Flora creations at Look Elite Model Agency (recreating the Coppola's Cotton Club), the lobby and the academy of the same model agency. Some of my own shops, like the Paris one, try to be not only a display of vendors, but an example of decor in that style.

Past Melu Deco buildings and decor: Cotton Club for Donna Flora Show at LookElite, Look Elite Agency lobby and academy.

For the exhibit room I've chosen a black and golden palette for decor and furniture, splitting up the large room by columns and setting luxurious furniture pieces and lamps all around the room.

The room is set according to the rules that feature the Art Deco decor of huge public buildings: large empty spaces, high ceiling, geometric and recursive patterns on walls, ceiling and floor, abundance of light points.

Although the prims' budget provided by Art India gallery for the exhibit was generous, I've used my new mesh version of furniture pieces, to show how a rich decor is possible even by a reasonable land impact.

Furniture are the "pendant" of the 40+ pics i've chosen to represent SL Art Deco details, following a minimalist mood that i've learned to keep in all my photo works.
Pics are taken in famous retro SIMs like 1920 Berlin, Swing Times, Chicago Roaring '20s, Seraph City, Reasonable Desires. But a lot of stunning Art Deco buildings are scattered around in fashion malls, BOSL, Best of Italian Style, Cartunno, or Rodeo Drive, where the impressive huge House of Beninbourough's main store gives to the place an unforgettable Art Deco taste.

Photography, like all arts, is an intuitive matter. Creating a meaningful pic is a work of eyes and soul (and of Windlight and Photoshop, of course! ;). But I love also being myself and making public aware about the rational meaning of the things that pics portray. So, according to Quan's advices, I've set an information area on a skybox (take the TP from the sign close to the exhibit's landing point).
It's a sort of "visual history" of Art Deco style: I know how boring can be reading long texts while visiting an art exhibit, so I tried to show visual examples of a few basic concepts about that style, its history, its legacy.

So you'll find there 11 big signs showing RL photos of buildings and objects or even great Art Deco stuff makers. Each one explains a concept or an historical step of that style in architecture, furnishing, arts, show business, cinema, showing also how long Art Deco taste had last and how much it is widespread around the entire world.

Exhibit's feedbacks have been a wonderful surprise! The opening party attracted a big crowd, and all people seem to have enjoyed their time there.  I've been gifted by a lot of blogposts by expert and wise art lovers and bloggers like Inara Pey, Vera Hamill, Kara Trapdoors, Apmel, Thinkerer Melville, Ziki Questi, Deoridhe Quandry, Eddie Haskell, Gemma Cleanslate (see links to posts below). Many pics of the exhibition have been posted on Flickr or on Facebook, and a very clever videomaker, Wizardoz Chrome posted  a wonderful video on You Tube, showing suggestively and exhaustively all the aspects of the exhibit. I'd had the pleasure and the honor to meet many of them, so the event has been to me also a way to increase my friendlist by the names of wonderful and passionate people.
I want to thank all of them, not only for the joy they gave me by their appreciation (sometimes I blushed, reading their good words on my own and Quan's work!) but also for letting people know an event that has been thought to be useful in sharing knowledge and culture in SL.

Art Deco exhibit on the Web:

Quan's Lavender presentation:


Reviews and FB entries:

Inara Pey's blog

Vera Hamill's blog

Kara Trapdoors' blog

Duna Gant FB page

Apmel's blog

Thinkerer Melville's blog

Ziki Questi's blog

SLArtExposed

Deoridhe Quandry blog
(Gallery as a background for Art Deco styling)

Eddie Haskell blog

SL Newser (Gemma Cleanslate) 

A surprise :)

Yesterday i got a TP from a friend.
As soon as i accepted it I came face to face with a true Command Squad, determined upon celebrating my 4th rezzday!
My closest friends, Laura, Yvette and Bety did summon me at Sonatta Morales's main store - one of my SL Dreamlands - commanding me to choose my gift :)
I thought to take advantage from their decision and I solemnly declarated I would be happy to accept the whole store as a gift ;)
After being listening a lot of laughs from them, I turned serious and I began the hard task of choosing among the endless wishes that store make me feel.
It should take even some weeks watching, desiring, comparing, choosing between gowns and cocktail dresses, reflecting on that pretty texture or on that cute ribbon... but I couldn't stole my friends so much time. So, I let my instinct driving me. And this is the result:

Aldebaran is a mid-short coktail dress made by a multi-layers skirt and a semi-transparent top, enriched by a darker men's taylored collar and by a wonderful black velvet sash with a big ribbon on the waist.
It comes along with matching textured shoes and clutch.
The wonderful black and gold flowered texture, the wide skirt, the classy and sexy shape of the top that leaves shoulders naked, compose a perfect whole, inspired to 1940s best elegance.

As usual, I'm grateful to Sonatta for offering all of us these great clothes. But, of course, I thank even more Laura, Yve and Bety for giving me this great gift. They know very well my taste, my preferences, my whims. I couldn't ever get their gift without their advices, based upon their model's and stylist's great skills.
Today I wanted to shoot the dress for this post, and I couldn't find a better place than the renewed Sonatta's shop at Seraph City. I love that City, one of the best retro environments in SL, and I find that the wide empty space of the shop's main hall, surrounded by a parade of Sonatta's masterpieces, would be a perfect background for this great creation.
I've chosen a pose by Reel: it's an homage to that great pose creator, who unfortunately left SL since a while.

Vanity is a matter of love: love for friends, for creators, for ourselves. So I'm happy to spend this time shooting the dress and writing this post, so full with vanity, and to dedicate it to my beloved friends.

Solitudes photo exhibit

Thanks to Serena Estates Center for Artists and the Arts managed by Vita Theas, I could display the whole collection of my photo themed "Solitudes". I got a small preview at my e-mage gallery at Chelsea, but i think that meanings and style of that kind of picture is enhanced when they are all together.

The pretty gallery open spaces gave the photos a great environment to be seen at their best. I loved seeing them on sky or trees backgrounds.
Many friends did enjoy the opening and could look at the exhibit chatting and drinking good champagne and vodka. I thank all of them and the others who will come visiting until the show will be open (end of September). 

The text that follows is taken from the Introduction on the Exhibit's sign, and expresses well my aims and the mood I got when working on these photos.

Solitude is a plural word. We can be alone in the most crowded places, we can find loneliness in a town street as well as in a desert. Solitude can be desperation but also peacefulness, just rest or push to fill the void.
Second Life adds new dimensions to these feelings: large spaces, few people, empty landscapes or buildings make us feel all the appeal of an uncrowded world. It can be slightly sad, but it makes us talk with things, lights, shapes. And they have a lot to tell.
I took a lot of picture of lonely places that fascinated me. I invite you to fill these empty spaces with your feelings.

If you like these thoughts, pls, visit the exhibit and enjoy it!

Some sample pics:

A streetcar called Desire

(taken at Paris 1900)

DeChirico

(taken at Hope for Emilia project)

Misty

(taken at Reasonable Desires)

Aftermath

(taken at The Abyss)

 50s

 (taken at Reasonable Desires)

 Dream

 Twins

(taken at Reasonable Desires)

Wrinkled

(taken at Tableau)

While writing this post, I realized I've been appointed as Photographer of the month by More Moolto magazine. Thank you, Moolto!

Read the article here (at page 81)