Melusina Parkin’s Themes is now open at the The Nite’s Place Red Line Exposition Area. Curated by Simonh Sandial, Themes features 42 photographs selected by Melusina in and exhibition space which allows them to be displayed in 6 groups of seven photographs apiece on the themes of “solitudes”, “landscapes”, “industry”, “details”, “urban” and “minimal”.

The selected images are striking in nature, each one displayed large enough to draw the eye into it, making the observer almost a part of the scene itself. What is particularly noticeable about many of the images is the fact that they appear so very life-like; so much so that on first look, it’s actually hard to tell whether they were taken in-world or in real-life. It is only on closer examination, or when the eye is drawn to certain clues, that the fact the photo was taken within SL becomes apparent.

Take the two images above (put side-by-side for comparison purposes): the one on the left (“Loneliness 1”) gives every impression of having been taken in RL, while in the second (“Loneliness 3”), it is only when one sees the while glow surrounding the nearer of the two sets of lamps that its SL origins are revealed.

This RL / SL “crossover” is intentional on Melusina’s art, as she informed Ziki Questi, who reviewed this exhibition earlier in May. “The aims of my photographer’s work are always the same: showing how fantasy and skills of SL residents made a world that reflects the main features of the natural or human environment’s common imagery,” Ziki quotes Melusina as saying of the pieces on display here.

Not only this, but the selected images beautifully – even hauntingly – reflect their intended themes. In this, several of the pictures in the “solitudes” section were particularly evocative for me, while “industry 1” (see on the left in the topmost image in this article) give rise to images of the romantic age of steam and the stirrings of time long past, together with the feeling of a story waiting to be told.

As noted at the top of this piece, this is a striking exhibition, and for those with a love of SL photography, definitely not one to be missed.

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Themes by Melusina Parkin, he Nite’s Place Red Line Exposition Area (Rated: Adult)