Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Editor’s note: After a hiatus that lasted most of last year, acclaimed metaverse artist Whiskey Monday recently returned to Flickr by storm, creating and uploading dozens of amazing images. 

“I usually work through creative stuff by writing,” she says of her relative absence. “When I hit a writer's block, I turn to photos in Second Life to kind of play around with some ideas and clear the junk from my head. So if you see that I take long periods of breaks between photos, it’s usually because my writing is going well. When you see me in SL taking pictures, you can be sure I have writer's block.” 

Cajsa appraises Whiskey’s latest work, and speaks with the artist below. – Hamlet Au

I love Whiskey Monday’s “Calm and Sunny” (above) in part because it is such a shift in tone and color from her usual work. Change can be exciting. However, I perceived it as part of a theme of revealing the facade or piercing the fourth wall because there were other unmasking pictures such as “Present Tenses,” “Painted Deserts,” and “Touched in the Head.” 

I asked Whiskey about the fourth wall. Well, what I saw and what she said were very different: 

“Was there ever a fourth wall? My intent is now, and has always been, to express something I'm having trouble expressing in other ways. My work is selfish; it's less for the viewer and more for me. I get a phrase or a quote stuck in my head and sometimes it makes its way into my writing and other times I can only get it out in SL photos. Sometimes the subject is more universal than others, but always it's me me me.” 

In literature, there is much debate about whose perspective matters when considering an author's work. Some look to the author’s biography and the historical context of their work. Semioticians look at the meaning and symbolism of the words, Marxists ask who benefits, Postmodernists ask us what the language really means and can we trust they mean what we think they mean. I was always with the Reader Response critics who recognized that everyone brings their own history to a text and that history influences their perception. I think that works in art criticism, too. We bring our Self to the task of appreciating a picture and our Self determines our reaction far more than the creator’s intent. That does not make our perception more accurate, but without readers, a book is forgotten, so it does make our perception important. I take that view when considering art as well. 

For another example of artist saying and viewer seeing very differently, click here:

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