Oberon Omura, who helps me keep abreast of things that are happening in the SL art world, sent me a little missive about Lemonodo Oh’s new installation at LEA24, which opened on Thursday, January 28th.

Borderlines is described by the artist as being inspired by the walks across SL organised by Vanessa Baylock, which caused him to come up with “defining a three-dimensional study area of a coastal region in maps and translating it to 64 sq m meshes and flat prims as appropriate.”

The result is what I’d define as an interpretation of a stretch of coastline, rather than a representation of that coastline. While the images used on the mesh and prim elements may well have been drawn from images available on Google Maps (and from, I believe, California), when put together as a whole and viewed panoramically under the right lighting, they could easily be part of the coastline from almost anywhere in the world; for my part, and while twiddling around with windlights, I was very much reminded of parts of both the Devonshire / Cornish coastline in the south-west of England and also of the Yorkshire coast.

Scattered across the low-lying areas of the installation are a number of dramatic photographs which, if not of the same areas of coastline as represented in the model, bear a strong resemblance to them in places. These are cleverly hidden from view until approached, when they slow fade into view, and add a striking new depth to the piece.

Lemonodo notes that while the project hasn’t worked out entirely as conceptualised, it nevertheless involves a number of borderlines – hence the title. Some of these may be obvious, others not so, Lemonodo doesn’t enter into specifics, so it is up to observer to hypothesize. Several did suggest themselves to me, including the use of the region boundary between this installation and that of the Medici University on LEA23 (which involves Vanessa Baylock whose grid-wide walks initially inspired this piece, remember).

I confess to being more intrigued by matters of perception and contrast, particularly when looking at the coastline from various distances and camera positions, and the manner in which it presents itself to the viewer and the (perhaps untended) questions on perception and depth raised by the inclusion of Lemonodo’s quite beautiful photographs (of which I’d frankly like to see more) against the background of the somewhat “flat” appearance of the Google Maps images when see up close and as they form the backdrop to the photos.

However you look at Borderlines, be it as art or an experiment in modelling or perception, Borderlines offers an intriguing addition to the current selection of Artist In Residence builds at the LEA.

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