The ArtWorld Market Report: The Aho Museum: Gwen Carillon and Gracie Kendal

The Aho Museum entrance at NMC Campus West. Icing by Gwen Carillon is to the left of the building.

Designed by architect CJ Holden (aka CJ Carnot), the virtual building and its environs provide a superior venue for the exhibition of artworks created within the Second Life^® virtual world. The building itself is an interactive artwork that changes in response to the environment.

The works by Gwen Carillon in the Aho Museum Sculpture Garden glow and fade, twist and turn. The notecard dispensed from the signage describes the exhibition as "eye candy," and the piece at the right edge above is titled Dime Store Candy. The work is not as superficial as that nomenclature suggests, and it bears a similar relationship to candy that Wayne Thiebaud's work does to pastry. When you view Echoes, be sure to get the notecard it dispenses, with the artist's associated poem.

Although most of the works in the current Aho Museum exhibition were created within the virtual world, these works by Artropolis resident Gracie Kendal (Kristine Schomaker) were painted in the real world with traditional media and the images imported. The relative size was adjusted to create the illusion of a large-scale installation. Several of the images appear to be maps of the imagination, or pictures of a new planet from outer space, with amorphous boundaries of land and water suggested by the blue and green areas, with red, blue or purple clouds.

Tayzia Abattoir, the exhibition's curator, has brought many works together from a range of artists in addition to the two featured. Tayzia has a long history of curating exhibitions in SL, and owns one of the premier collections. . As a whole, the current show provides a great introduction to the creative possibilities that have brought artists into this new medium, with examples going back to 2004.

AM Radio's interactive sculpture Die as Marat puts you in the bathtub posed like the character in the painting hanging above it. Besides being fun, this highly detailed art-referential work shows the mastery of technique that attention to detail that has come to be a hallmark of AM's work.

RacerX Gullwing, creator of the popular Giant Snail Races that have become a Saturday activity for many SL residents, is represented by an interactive piece of wall art titled Snails On Holiday. Get the notecard it dispenses with an explanation of the work: "The scenery changes every 60 seconds and it will rez a 3 Dimensional representation of what a Giant Snail does on his days off from the Races."

Snails On Holiday by RacerX Gullwing

In the center of the Aho's ground floor gallery is Sasun Steinbeck's Interactive Morphing Sculpture. Also on view are works by Filthy Fluno, Morris Vig, and many more than I could see in one viewing.

Solitude by Stormy Roentgen evokes Art Deco and Social Realism, and the influence of Gaston Lachaise

Fetus Tree is a 2004 sculpture by Starax Statosky, the earlier incarnation of the artist now known as Light Waves.

Above is an early work by Starax Statosky, one of the first to explore the possibilities of sculpture creation using the building tools of the Second Life^® virtual world. The flesh-colored sculpture, titled Fetus Tree , has branches terminating in umbilical cords to nourish its growing fetuses, appropriate to a world inhabited by virtual lifeforms. LittleToe Bartlett works with a similar metaphor in marionette 1.07, a sculpture that reminds viewers that the avatar they identify with in this world, observing this artwork, is itself a form of marionette they are manipulating.

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