Reveling in Real World art - One very right way to savor it in Second Life

The Hotel Dare Showcase dazzles with a tribute to Ray Caesar

Posted by Bettina Tizzy
© All rights reserved on images by Ray Caesar

I'm not saying there is only one way to enjoy art from the other side in Second Life®, but the new Hotel Dare Showcase which opens today allows the visitor to step right into it (in fact, you are sucked in) on a whole new level. The approach is not new to us. We already enjoy Frankie Rockett's Art Box and AM Radio's Death of Marat, among other installations, but never have we had the opportunity to become a part of Real Life art to this degree.

Gattina Dumpling has already curated three sessions of the Hotel Dare (not to be confused with the Showcase), a concept space she conceived that goes far beyond the typical gallery setting to feature the location-appropriate works of rotating Second Life artists who have been given a hotel "room" to do whatever they wish with it. The latest version resides on the Poetik sim (teleport directly from here).

Now Gattina has acquired half a sim - dubbed the Hotel Dare Showcase - which will be devoted to celebrating the works of Real Life artists. The inaugural show pays tribute to Ray Caesar, and includes the participation of Marie Lauridsen, Katat0nik Pidgeon, Autumn Hykova, and Leetah Moxie, as well as Daniel Luchador who created most of the rooms.

Complete avatars are for sale at the arrival point. Enter the "lobby" of the Hotel Dare, which this time around looks more like a grand salon, and admire/become the art. Hint: It helps to walk up the paintings.


Blackbird by Ray Caesar

Gattina was traveling yesterday but nevertheless responded to my email:

"This is very hard to do from an iPhone. I dropped out of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before I graduated. And I started college at age 16. For fine arts. I haven't painted anything in about 14 years. I have had an interest in "lowbrow art" (see juxtapoz and hi fructose magazines) and artists like Ray Caesar, Mark Ryden, Camile Rose Garcia, and Sylvia Ji since I first visited the La Luz De Jesus gallery in L.A. about 11 years ago."

Wikipedia: Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. Lowbrow is a widespread populist art movement with origins in the underground comix world, punk music, hot-rod street culture, and other subcultures. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor - sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it's a sarcastic comment.


Ray Caesar's Blackbird, interpreted by Hotel Dare Showcase in Second Life

Gattina: I can remember the first time I saw Ray Caesar's art. It was a few years ago in Juxtapoz magazine and I can remember feeling that I wanted to ...

It wasn't just the feeling of wanting to own some of his art. It was more of the feeling "I want, I want, I want to.. BE that. I want to BE there.I want to GO IN THERE.


L'accord d'amour by Ray Caesar

Gattina: His work inspires an urgent sense of yearning. The viewer wants to crawl into these worlds he has created, to explore the dark nooks and crannies his subjects inhabit, to root around for secrets and open letters addressed to someone else and ... to find what they have lost. Ray Caesar owns all of our mysteries. He collects them and ensnares them in his art, he captures them in hidden drawers and hides them under beds and shadows them in corners of century-old rooms and in the murky depths of the sea.

His work depicts romantic landscapes, dreamy and lush, angelic inhabitants gaze upon the viewer, at times serene, at times accusatory. Porcelain- skinned girls sprout mechanical limbs and mile-long tentacles bloom from under delicate petticoats. There is something reflected in the mirror, hidden behind the drapery, lurking in the shadows. The observer is all too easily lost in these worlds. The viewer is the victim in his vampiric world, lulled into submission by his supernatural creations. Ray Caesar claims to have been born a dog. For a dog he is also a soothsayer, an architect, a magician. An analyst sitting behind a large wooden desk, taking snippets of our dreams, hopes and fears, moments of our childhoods and locking them away in the astounding worlds he has created.


Ray Caesar's L'accord d'amour, as interpreted by the Hotel Dare Showcase in Second Life

The most amazing realization occurs when it dawns on you that all of his art was created in Maya. His images are the very best of computer arts; the nuances and layers stagger and enthrall the imagination.


Images by Ray Caesar

Ray Caesar wrote: I color the models first in a very simple way, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture that may be painted digitally such as a flower petal or from a digital photograph such as a wood surface. I collect textures the way some people collect little silver spoons and I have a story about each texture in my collection…

As my work is printed I am often asked about my original, but it exists only in the computer in a dimensional world of depth, width and height. I am fascinated by the concept that this 3-dimensional space exists much as another reality and even though I turn the computer off, I am haunted by the fact that this space is still there existing in a mathematical probability, and the space that we live in now might not be all that different.


Descent by Ray Caesar

Gattina: I picked the team I did for the build because they are people I have worked with before and I knew they would be able to translate my vision for the build and make it a reality. Daniel is known as one of the most talented builders on SL, Katat0nik is an artist in her own right and has won the award for best fashion designer Japan Second life, Marie and I share the same aesthetics, love the same artists and she is an amazing skin artist, and Autumn and Leetah were happy and excited to do the hair.


Ray Caesar's Descent, as interpreted by Hotel Dare Showcase in Second Life

Teleport to the Hotel Dare Showcase directly from here.

Avatar poses by Helianthus Mesmer.

Soror Nishi: "Your computer screen is stained glass"

Posted by Bettina Tizzy

Every time I teleport to see a new creation by Soror Nishi, I feel the same kind of rush that I used to get when I would open up a fresh and fragrant pack of fruit-flavored Life Savers as a child. In fact, if I could eat prims, I think Soror’s trees would make a righteous summer lunch.



Soror is best known for her electrifying and primordial forests, "ancient trees," and bodacious flowers, but she also makes avatar adornments such as sinewy and curvilinear antlers, and brightly colored jewelry.




All photographs above by Lem Skall

Don't let Soror fool you, and she will, given the chance (she's a kidder, that one). In reality, she's a Brit, but has been known to describe herself as hailing from Harajuku, being the daughter of a flower seller and having a software magnate for a husband. In truth, she is an artist who invades our senses with her bold colors, and paints her textures rather than photograph them.


Soror Nishi

In a notecard that accompanied a recent art show of hers, I read that "Concerned about the diminishing native flora of Second Life®, she set about planting and nurturing the plants that the Lindens had cleared from the land with an over-grazing of goats and the like. Her work in preserving "the Ancient Ones" for future generations is well known, and her recent discoveries of rare orchids have generated much interest." She's like that. It is quite true.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted. - Henry Matisse

I used to associate Soror's exotic and glowing colors with the Mayan world, where every textile and craft dances in vivid shades, but she enhanced and modernized that view when I spoke with her.

Soror Nishi: I think that light through glass, which is what we are working with… is particularly suited to bright color. If you want earth colors, use oil paint.

Stained glass?

Soror Nishi: Yes. The computer screen is a stained glass. It is like television, which is badly used, really. The screen has amazing possibilities, but is best shown off with colors. The Simpsons for example... Virtual worlds have more in common with stained glass than with photography, and (our) failure to recognize this results in poor copies of boring everyday objects, architecture, flora and fauna. These colors belong in Second Life by virtue of the medium we use. The extensive attempts some make to populate this new world with "realistic" copies of the Old World show a colonial tendency to ignore the native culture and superimpose a pre-formed visual style.


Soror Nishi at Hotel Dare

Hotel Dare, conceived and curated by Gattina Dumpling, is a concept space that goes far beyond the typical gallery setting to feature the location-appropriate works of rotating artists who have been given a hotel "room" to do whatever they wish with it. Dare has relocated to the new Poetik sim and Gattina invited Soror to collaborate with CensoredMy Lunt and become a hotel "guest."



Open the typical hotel door to enter Soror and CensoredMy's "room" and find yourself walking through boldly colored tunnels infused with psychedelic particle effects...





... and strange mushrooms that you wouldn't dream of eating unless... well, I do believe that Les Fauves artists would have thought they'd died and gone to heaven.



Waiting at the end of the room is an explanation of what you have just experienced. I'll let you be surprised. Teleport directly to Poetik from here.

You can purchase Soror's landscape art, jewelry and accoutrements at Nishi Beach (teleport directly from here).

Hotel accomodations to dance about

Given the choice between a five star chain hotel and a smaller, stylish home-away-from-home, I'll go for the latter every time. Conceived and built by Gattina Dumpling, Hotel Dare is the grid's only chic boutique hotel that I am aware of, and with several unique rooms designed by artists, there's something for everyone and every mood.

The room designed by Amsterdam-based illustrator (click this link, click this link!) and artist four Yip, is pure, undiluted and chocolaty fun.

Take a shower and you will find yourself dancing, have a friend hop on a pillow opposite you and you'll mirror each other's antics, jump on the bed, have a pillow fight, dance - like Cinderella - with your ballgown, and munch on some chocolate flowers (white or milk), too. And you get to take many of these goodies home with you! Now tell me, how many hotels let you do that? Four tells me that lots of people assisted Gattina with the creation of Hotel Dare, including Meat Carver, Mijn Boa, Teddy Whitefield and more.




Teleport directly from here.