Light and shapes as protagonists: Salk building by Fanatik

It's the first time I write about a building.

Thanks to a lucky encounter, I have now the Salk building by Fanatik in my inventory.

Flickr isn't a traditional social network, but also there people meet, sharing their passions and skills, talking about their pics and styles, noticing each others things they love.
So happened to me with Kendra Zaurak of Fanatik. I knew Fanatik buildings since a long time, and I've been appreciating their special style, their perfect shadowing, and how good they represent some of the most amazing modern architecture styles. Reading Kendra's comments to my pics has been a great surprise and I felt honored to receive congrats from such a refined connoisseur of modern design and aesthetics.
 
I'm even more honored to get the opportunity to shot the building Kendra kindly gave me, after we spent a very nice time talking about architecture history and styles.

It's the Salk building. The name belongs to the Salk Institute building, made in RL in the 1960s by the great architect Louis Kahn, who worked side to side with the Institute founder, the famous doctor Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. The Institute is a big and prominent research institution, and its venue is a masterpiece of modern architecture.

Fanatik wanted to rebuild one of the buildings that form the big compound of the Institute.
It's a stunning building: the most modern ideas of the 1960s architecture are living in it and they are still a great lesson in architecture, taste and style. Raw materials made to last in the time without need of expensive maintenance; simple geometric shapes and lines to design open and "natural" spaces, where natural light plays the main role; suggestive changing perspectives at every change of point of view both from the interiors and from outside...
Fanatik replica is the same: an extremely careful choice of texture and lighting makes an intricate game of shadows; a perfect harmony among concrete walls, open windows, stairs and pillars produces fascinating compositions of shapes; wide wooden windows and doors contrast with the raw concrete, pairing the "born" and the "made" (wood and concrete) with a clear reference to the original's inspiration.

I shot it according to my own style: my passion for minimalist images has found a paradise in the Salk building, the large uniform surfaces, the alternance of materials, the contrast between voids and masses have been an endless source of inspiration for my eye.
I won't present a traditional blogger review of it, here. I've simply taken advantage from the building to build a series of  photos that follows my usual style and aim: catching unusual perspectives, letting light and shadow playing, showing details and compositions of geometrical shapes, enhancing the contrasts of empty spaces and massive elements. Full minimalism, in a few words.
 

 

 

 

 
 

Fashion friends

I love blogging my friends' gifts.
I'm so lucky to have among my most beloved friends great designers like Maizon Rayna, of Terra d'Ombra. After a long while, I had the opportunity to share with her a nice time last night, visiting her rather new, stunning SIM and showing her the MEB main store new display.

While talking about fashion, I showed her the recent MEB dress Turin. Suddenly she sent me a box, saying "I have the right necklace for that neckline!".
Who is familiar with Terra d'Ombra (if you aren't, you're missing one of the tops of SL fashion!) knows very well Maizon's jewels make us dream, as well as her dresses do. So, I'd no doubt that she was right saying that!   

I was wearing a pearl chocker, a very nice one, but it just decorated my neck, leaving the deep back neckline naked. I worn immediately the Maizon's ROMY jewel set, and my shoulder has been enriched by a wonderful design of tiny gold chains and shiny black gems. A bigger gem with a golden bow closed the perfect symmetry of the three-strand necklace, only one of them being shown on the breast. Opulent earrings complete the set, giving the outfit a touch of glamour more :)

I told it, yet: I'm lucky to have so talented friends. I hope MariaElena and Maizon will like the combination of their creations :))

 

More cities... Exhibit City's Two Faces at LezSpain Gallery

My friends Annie Rothlisberger and Bimba Orfan, owners of the pretty Lezspain Gallery, where I have already had an exhibit, saw my photo show City Details at ImagineNation Gallery and asked me to go back to their gallery.
Since the urban theme is an endless path I follow in my SL explorations, I've thought to show other aspects of that. My archive is full with cities' pictures, and I selected some 35 ones, depicting the ugly and the fair in the SL representation of urban environments.
Sad outskirts and pretty streets of nice houses, dark alleys and pleasant corners, lonely places and delightful buildings alternate in these photos, showing how different can be our look on cities.
Thanks to Lezspain for the opportunity of adding a chapter more to my passionate novel about SL urban views.

 

TP to Galeria Lezspain

UPDATE January 20th

A crowdy and lovely opening, yesterday!
Visitors could enjoy a nice time of music and dance in the same room of the exhibit (good idea, Annie and Bimba!), with the great tunes proposed by DJGeisha.

And now I've the pleasure to read two reviews, by Ziki Questi and by Apmel Goosson: both ones focused the main aim of the series I displayed, and Apmel adds a pretty touch of fun, quoting a nice talk we get at the party :) It shows very well the happy and relaxed mood we enjoyed at the exhibit :) Thank you!
http://zikiquesti.blogspot.it/2014/01/citys-two-faces.html
http://apmel.blogspot.it/2014/01/year-of-love.html (scroll the post to read about my exhibit)

"City details" exhibit at ImagineNation Gallery

Thanks to Cindy Starostin Ochs and Warren Ochs, owners of  ImagineNation Gallery, I'll open tomorrow a new photo exhibit.

 
Its theme should be familiar to them who have followed my Flickr in these years: "City details" mixes up my interest for urban environments and my love for details.
The photos in the exhibit don't show wide urban landscapes, but streets, corners, single buildings... I think that these fragments, caught from a closer point of view, can suggest atmospheres and way of life (or better, dealing with SL, the way of imagining and representing atmospheres and ways of life).

I collect this kind of pictures since a long while: I keep being fascinated by the huge number and variety of urban SIMs around SL and I can't stop exploring them. From oldest mainland places to new RP SIMs with very refined graphics, all those cities are amazing and reveil impressive corners.
You can see here more than 20 different examples of SL cities, from the famous 1920 Berlin to the less known RP places. 
In the past months I dedicated a You Tube slideshow to the urban decay; that "Urban Blues" was another way to look at SL cities: in this exhibit I want to portray a less distressed side of them well ordered streets, elegant buildings, bright lights, but also bus or metro stations, dark corners and lonely squares.
 

 

Urban Blues on You Tube

As always, things' colors, shadows, lights, contrasts are my protagonists, rather than humans. An ancient author wrote that a city isn't made by stones but by its citizens... well, I want to reverse this statement, like Renaissance painters have made, depicting their "ideal cities" as empty places.
After all, what are SL cities if not "ideal" ones, both when they replicate historical towns, and when they built a "typical" environment for playing a crime game?
 

I hope this journey through great SL builts will lead visitors to think of the passion and of the caution that owners and builders got in creating and in mantaining their cities. I also hope to succeed in offering a different "eye" for looking those creation with all the care they deserve, discovering meanings and suggestions they can give.

ImagineNation gallery

***

UPDATE JANUARY 6th

I got some pretty memories of the opening.
As I wrote in the comment below, Ziki Questi wrote a kind review of the exhibit
http://zikiquesti.blogspot.it/2014/01/city-details-by-melusina-parkin.html  

and WuWai Chun honored me with a wonderful portrait on her Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wuwaichun/11785109513/

Moreover, Cindy Starostin Ochs took as well a nice pic of me,

and now...
LadyVelvetrose gave me this pretty composition depicting all the guests at the event:

A big thank to all of them!

***

UPDATE JANUARY 10th

Wizardoz Chrome is a videomaker who specialize in art events. Her collection of videos on You Tube is a kind of archive of art events in SL 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU0yKGOQ01H9J_k9TWKpocvg

Moreover, they are artworks as well: extremely well-finished images and great soundtracks.
Through them you can enjoy an event at its best even when you missed it.
Well, today, Wiz made me another gift, making a video at the opening of City Details exhibit!
I can only comment that I'm the most happy with it and I encourage all of you to enjoy it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSlCwAt828g&list=UU0yKGOQ01H9J_k9TWKpocvg&index=1

Thank you, Wiz!!!



      

Santa has come to my home!

Santa charged my friend Laura to bring me a gift! ;)
Today I got a pretty Christmas box, and inside it I found a very lovely dress from Compulsion :))
It's something that remembers the famous Coco's words about "a little black dress" :)

A double-layered short dress: a simple black lace tunic, covered by a smaller opaque one. Lace is shown on the top and sticks out from the bottom edge of the graceful skirt. On the high waist, it's decorated by a tiny belt with a large golden buckle. Sober, simple and extremely classy!
I'm very happy to hear from Laura that she thought of me, when she had seen that. I think that is a great compliment being viewed as a girl who matches this great style!
So, I thank her by styling the dress at my best and shooting it in a proper place, the glamorous Deco Cafe at Bay City.
Happy Holidays!

Frosty Impressions contest at Galerie der Sinne - 2nd winner

I've taken part in the Frosty Winter contest at Galerie der Sinne, whose owners Pippa Mint and Herzkoenig Actor are very active in supporting art photography. They make seasonal contests at their beautiful venue, and award ceremonies are enriched by beautiful concerts.

I'd had the honor to be among the winners, this time, and I enjoyed a lovely night of live guitar music by Arminus Writer.

Antartica Slade and Damatjo Magic have bee the 1st and the 3rd winner with their beautiful photos.

Many thanks to the Galerie and to its owners, and also to the jury, made by Brin Oh, Falbala Farey, Roy Mildor and Max Butoh.

Here below the pic that has been awarded

(better view on my Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/melusina_parkin/11358528446/)

 All the photos of the contest can be seen at the Galerie der Sinne

See also the Flickr of Antartica and Damatjo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ayecreartivephotography/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46567538@N03

 

Birthday gift!

My beloved friends Laura, Julie and Briju know how they have to do when they want to present me a gift... They just have to TP me to Sonatta Morales's store and to be patient, suffering my hundreds of "Oooh! Look at this!", "Wonderful!", "I have to wear this!", or my endless comments about that or that other dress' style and history...
When a new collection like Reverie is displayed at that store, my enthusiatic comments and my indecision about choosing are even harder to afford!
How I prefer to cheat my usual MEB clothes? (Well, it isn't exactly cheating: MEB doesn't make retro clothes!). Which dress deserves to be chosen first? The sparkling CoolJazz or the romantic Garden? The (super)classy, Balenciaga-style, Noite or the dreamy Mesmerizer?

Sonatta Morales' Reverie Collection, some examples

At the end of the tale, I'd fallen in special love with two great dresses, so my friends could have a sigh of relief!
I definitely love them and my new dresses Babylon and Artemisia. I'm wearing them in these pictures, taken on the appropriate background of the Deco Yacht Club.

Artemisia

Artemisia is a 1930-40s style dress, inspired by oriental design. Long pencil skirt, crossed neckline, black silk painted with golden natural patterns, large black sash on the waist, short black gloves and a simple round hat: it's perfect for an elegant happy hour or even for an important work meeting. I wear here the Diva Winged sunglasses, trying to imitate the wonderful look (a bit "dark lady") of the store's vendor. Who loved Wong Kar Wai "In the mood for love" movie could maybe recognize something of the classy and austere elegance shown there by Maggie Cheung.

Babylon

When I saw Babylon the first time, worn by a Sonatta's store model, I thought of Josephine Baker. Not on the stage, but in her real life, when she changed the famous bananas nude costume to more wearable, sensual and totally original dresses. It talks of Art Deco at its best: geometric, opulent black and golden patterns on an orange background, long decorated black gloves, a simple straight cut enriched by whimsical feathers at the hips' sides.

Have I to add anything to the happiness I show in my pics and in my words?

Thank you, my friends!

 

 

Gaia project at LEA 13

An old friend like Nino Vichan (we have happily worked together at the Esselle Movie Magazine for a long time) gave me the honor to take part in an amazing project called "Gaia" at LEA. A collaborative event, coordinated by Nino and Aloisio Congrejo and Tani Thor of Tanalois, involving 11 artists (the three mentioned and Betty Tureaud, Kicca Igaly, Gem Preis, Chinon Beaumont, Comet Morigi, Cayenne Avon, Daco Monday and myself), called to be inspired by the well known Lovelock-Margulis Gaia Theory about Earth's life. 

Although it deals with ecology, of course, I wanted to experiment a quite different approach than the most traditional one to that theme. In shooting or selecting my photos I tried to show the lack of balance that industrial and urban development had introduced into the "organic" model built by the Gaia theorist to explain how our planet works as a whole.
So I used a simple trick: alternating images of nature and urban or industrial landscapes in the same frame, and letting the visitors changing them by clicking on easy, opposite symbols set on the photo itself (a burning industrial bin and a tree).

So, my pictures try to show two worlds which cohabit the same planet. The reference to Gaia hypotesis are mostly in the introduction and in the last photo shown.
In the text I started by a quote from one of the first popular books that started to build an ecologist awareness in the Sixties, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, talking of th absurdity of the fight humans are doing against nature, that's a fight against themselves. I continued with another quote, taken by an impressive more recent book, Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, envisaging a future where man doesn't give up "progress" to go back to "nature" (the most naif version of ecology) but where machines (the "Done") do work according to the logic of the nature (the "Born").

This is roughly symbolized by the last picture: tall windmills taking energy from nature in a pleasant and intact natural environment.

It's just an attempt to show something we can only to glimpse, today. But it could be the way for a future where the two worlds could be again only one, "organic" whole.

I can't finish with this post without remarking how the wonderful concert by Ultraviolet at the opening contributed to enjoy the exhibits at their best.

My "Americana" photos on Bestyle magazine!

What better, for a photographer, than being requested to publish her photos on a magazine?
Agtaope Carter-Lane, editor of Bestyle magazine did it to me!

She told me she had been impressed by my first "chapter" of the series "Americana" I've posted on my Flickr and asked me copies to publish them on her great mag.

I know and love Bestyle since a very long time: MEB's SIM, Klio, is close to the old, glorious Best of Italian Style one; we collaborate with The Best since the time when Annemarie Perenti, the mall founder, allowed MEB to open a pretty store there.
The friendship between MariaElena Barbosa, the MEB designer, and Annemarie quickly has extended to myself, and I lived an exciting experience working close to the volcanic Anne's mind :) Then, Agtaope had taken the SIM and the magazine from Annemarie, who was tired of the huge work and who wanted to live a more relaxed SL. And a new close friendship had begun :)
New collaborations started up, and I saw that Agy's sweetness is paired to great managing skills: the magazine follows improving in quality and in richness, fashion market had had a big impulse by Gypset market and finally the whole SIM has been rebuilt in a minimal and classy style by Creativedream Zsun.
MEB had had the honour to be on almost all the issues of Bestyle, including with a cover story (July-August 2012), with the wonderful photos by Florence Babenco, while the MEB shop at The Best follows being one of the most important in MEB stores' web.

 (MEB cover story - Bestyle July-August 2012)

(The latest MEB ad on Bestyle magazine: September-October 2013)

Moreover, as MEB CEO, I've taken care of participating to the Bestyle market Gypset and to collaborate to Soloevane Agency events, based at Bestyle, offering room in the Klio SIM (last opportunity is in these days, the Autumn Symphony shows managed by Genevieve Kamala, Preciouss Metal and Sequoia Nightfire, other beloved friends!
By the way, on next Friday October 11th, MEB will be on that event's runway showing its new Fall Collection.

This is the past (and I'm sure, the future, too), but the wonder and the happiness of today is seeing my name and a reference to my "Americana" photos even on the new Bestyle issue's cover!

Emotions in virtual world are pretty real, and I feel them very strongly in my heart. Although I published some MEB ad's photos on that magazine yet, seeing there so many pages showing a set of photos I love very much makes of today one of my top days in SL :))
Thank you Agy, thank you Bestyle!

("Americana" is a series of photographs showing some of the best SL places inspired to American locations and themes. Chapters will be gathered in a set under this title: http://www.flickr.com/photos/melusina_parkin/sets/72157635715192173/)

Bestyle magazine is avalaible from kiosks at The Best of Italian Style SIM or in the best fashion stores.