Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Yennifer Derket makes me wonder what Salvador Dalí would have made of Second Life. Her “Ayahuasca” reminds me of his famous quote, “Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.”
By taking screen shots in SL and layering them with pictures from nature, pop art, and the many visual artifacts of modern life, Yennifer creates something completely new, unique, and surreal. “Ayahuasca” may be one of the most sedate of her recent works.
For more of Yennifer’s distinctive art, click here:
In “Destruction,” Yennifer combines scenes of a bombed out city, perhaps in Ukraine or Gaza with a beautiful head that is filling with loose humus and the detritus of destruction, breaking down, filling the head which is itself degrading, with cracks forming and even small fractures coalescing on the surface as the interior fills with rotting soil. The sky is a lovely bright blue with fluffy, white clouds. Doesn’t it seem as though such pain and destruction demands overcast, gray, and mournful skies? Does the fluffy blueness of it all seem almost obscene? How dare nature have a beautiful day when we are so set upon destruction.
“In Her Dreams” contains elements that are particular motifs in her work, clocks, eyes, and penguins. I love how she used the butterfly overlay and the way her moon and star earrings are against the sky. She has many more complex works that she has done more recently, but this seems to capture the threads that she will weave into her work again and again from the dancing avatar, the head as a canvass against which other things are overlaid, and those tropes she continues to use. I love it as an prospect of what is to come.
Yennifer Derket treats her screenshots as a canvass upon which she paints far more complex and surreal images, assembling disparate elements that may seem to have no relationship to each other at first glance, but in her imagination are massaged into something new, otherworldly, and yet, congruent. The finished picture is not discordant even if you cannot explain why a penguin is tending bar or standing next to a cactus in a cape.
All images copyright Yennifer Derket
Cajsa’s Choices is devoted to unique, artistic, and innovative virtual world-based images and screenshots that showcase the medium as an art form and Second Life as a creative platform. (Generally not images that fit on this Bingo card.)
Cajsa Lilliehook is a 18 year resident of SL. In addition to browsing Flickr for SL artists, she spends a lot of time researching and reporting on Republican sexual predators. In her first life, she is a retired grassroots leader who has worked for economic and social justice issues most of her life. She is also the minion of a cat named Nora.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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