I received an invitation to preview Closer Looks, a new exhibition of photography by Melusina Parkin, which officially opens on Monday July 28th at 15:00 SLT at La Sociedad de los Poetas Dementes gallery on Mexico MX.

I last reviewed one of Melusina’s exhibitions in May 2014, when she was exhibiting Themes, which featured 42 of her pieces on display at the The Nite’s Place Red Line Exposition Area. Closer Looks presents around 45 of her photographs, taken of various locations around Second Life and which, as the name of the exhibition suggests, presents them in close-up, focusing down on a specific element within each image, encouraging the observer to similarly focus their attention.

“Watching things from close-up is an amazing practice,” Melusina says in the liner notes accompanying the exhibition. “Isolating an element or detail in a scene, focusing on it, is like when you repeat a word in your mind until it does lose its meaning; it starts then revealing unexpected associations suggesting unusual relationships, showing unforeseen details in it.”

As with Themes, many of these images in this exhibition appear to be drawn from certain thematic elements: cars, structures, ships, skylines, which at first appear to suggest associations between them. However, each picture in fact works on a far more subtle level than that, encouraging the observer to consider the associations which lie not so much between them, but in what is within each of them, and what they start to suggest to the observer’s own mind. It’s an effect Melusina intended to achieve within each of the pictures.

“When photographed, the most trivial object, thanks to framing, light, shadows and colours handling, can acquire a completely different than its own actual or usual one,” Melusina notes. “This is what I tried to do in each of these photos. Enhancing the evocative power of daily life objects and landscapes, showing them out of their context or catching their hidden fascination by camera framing and lighting.”

In this, this exhibition stands as something of a comment on Second Life, where the incredible diversity of creative expression can so easily become trivialized or marginalised by the incredible scope and beauty evident is seeing whole regions and estates, where houses, trees, vehicles, and everything else can so easily blur together that we can miss so much. It is only when we pause, when we take the time to focus down on things, that we can really see just how amazing things in this digital world really are and how incredibly different things really are, even when seemingly alike – and how they can so often challenge our own creative perceptions, encouraging us to think of ways and means of doing things, and so further adding to the creative diversity others can see and learn from.

All told, another thought-provoking and visually stylish exhibition from Melusina, with each of the images on display on sale for anyone who would like to take a piece home with them.

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