Ballet of Little Liars “Chameleon”

My friend GlitterPrincess Destiny – Storie’s created into Second Life an installation named Ballet of Little Liars “Chameleon”.
This is my comment to it, and something else.

 

A portrait of Kristine Blackadder from the installation

 

The more the time goes on, the more you grow beautiful in your works. This expo (see also here) is quite not a silly thing… this one has nothing similar to the firsts ones I saw: Dracula, Alice…: this one is a very serious stuff for adults only, because a child cannot see nor understand what you do here. More than 65 pictures, sometime suggested again; most of them associated with a poem. Not to draw a story but the strong and large emotions of a mind, all (dis-)organized in a huge, complex and well-done building made by the skilful strokes of Terrygold.

This is a whirlwind made by everything you are, in which you involve and distort impressions that are very significant to you. One presence, above all, obviously.

Inside your magic hat you throw a lot of things: Second Life experiences, old photos, drawings made with your pencil, pieces of yourself and things and people you love. In the same hat you put feelings, emotions, sensations. Then, as if you shake everything in a huge blender, from the magic hat comes out … what? Yourself, simply. The same yourself that we know, the same one that she knows. That I know.

I’ve heard that this exhibition is too much messy, but it’s not true: this expo is you. Nothing else. The glass in which you look at yourself is not hanging on the wall, straight, in a nice  frame, in the right position: it’s broken and the fragments are all scattered on the ground in the most varied angles, and it’s there where we can see you. It is there that you mirror your face. Your mind.

The story begins in a basement, with a newspaper cutting:

Newspapers kidnap: Incredible as it may seem, it has been confirmed a ballerina has been kidnapped and her where about’s are unknown at this time. However odd the police have received a note from the kidnapper stating that clues lay inside of a metal trunk into the woods deep but adds it would be impossible to find.

 Signed: Shhhh Dance only for me

The ballerina: I remember your previous ballerinas, I remember yourself showed as a dancer. Here the ballerina is one of the leitmotiv of the work, and … not! The ballerina was not kidnapped, this was your own dream. Better: yes, the dancer was kidnapped but not by that person who could tell her: Shhhh … Dance just for me. She was kidnapped by herself, by her loneliness, by her desire to be taken by others. From her anguish.

The ballerina … that is the puppet, the inert and inane puppet who is caught and overwhelmed by greater facts, by deeper and mysterious drives, so that she (it?) undergoes his own life. Then, something or someone cuts the strings that hold the head and the arms and the legs; so, the ballerina, forced before to dance by another will, collapses inert, immovable, useless. fallen on her broken dreams.

 

A body collapsed
An escape I am not Dead
To kill a Rose is so hard
is it not?
How many times must I die

A doll not alive, no more alive. Someone cut her strings: she cannot be alive if alone

At the end of the first level of the work you put a room; in the centre of that space I can take on a dancer pose and then the whole room rotates; so, also the pictures hung on the walls turn: I see this idea as a way to enter into you, together with all the images that rotate fast almost like to blend one into another and all into myself (that is: into yourself).

Many mirrors, many fragments of that unique mirror, now irretrievably split into heterogeneous portions, they show us really you, yet in some different ways. How to tell us how many different people you are, until we understand that

0h: so many secrets… so many persons are we…

This moves me particularly and intensely. From several years, to find out how many people we are is my obsession: it is for this reason that I write: to describe all the men and the women that I have inside. I had in 2005 a first thought about this idea and it is for the same reason that the Virginia Woolf’s book, The Waves, struck me so much deeply:

 

Alia

 Now the mirror throws makeup undone
of a clown forced thus by the fate

this old bag of flesh blinds, masks and hides
a crowd deep inside me that is waiting

 
I see my mirror: it throws makeup
undone of a clown forced by fate

 this old bag of flesh blinds, masks and hides
a crowd deep inside me that is waiting
 

                          Judy Barton, May 2005

 

And the love.

The insistence of the red rose that you put almost everywhere into the installation does not affect the awareness about that love that is forbidden. In a picture, you are hugging each the other, almost kissing you, but his mouth and nose are concealed by a red mask, almost unwilling to be contaminated by you. And you’re blindfolded. With a red bandage:

secret little liar

 I dream,
I escape, a horror of insanity now
that my heart was so touched,
I will come …
… for you
This is our final performance
familiar breathing
Muted mouths
only you …
can touch close…
behind my mask
…

little lairs

 
Shhhh dance me one more time

 

It was she, Kristine, to involve you in a series of movies (this one is the first of them) in which she tells us herself, with the maturity, the irony and the intelligence of the experience. Moreover, you write by quoting one of those machinimas, Maya Veil:

 

we came alive from Kristine Blackadder “Maya Veil”:

I am your Veil of illusions
not reality
Come with me Come
      

  signed: maya veil

 

Well.

Here, almost being delirious, you face the pain of an impossible love by resuming and living again and twisting sections and frames of those movies, telling us yourself as seen in her reflection.

Especially two photos are shooting.

In the first  one (see above or here) she is very sexy yet terrible too: a pic full of blood, a face with no eyes because they are hidden by the hair; in the centre of the photo there is her mouth with her lips half closed: beautiful, soft, pink, full lips; the light is almost only on her lips, to kiss them but she shows no eyes, as no soul, as she is not really here but somewhere else. A second light spot is on the gun: also the gun is kissed by the same light.

The second photo is, significantly, one of the last and it is very similar to the first one: the same lips, the same face, the same gun. No colour: only sepia, almost a black and white pic. The gun is headed to the temples now, but the lips are the real terrible detail: she is quite no sexy here and her lips are the grey lips of dead body.

My Final Performance: ….

 I escape a horror of insanity now
that my heart was so touched
…and now…
my platter is empty…
I will come for you with a rose
This is our final performance

 

The second image is inside the place you called “your home“: a strange building that tends to the sky, like an old lighthouse without light, full of scraps and messy. Your house … yourself?

 

Then there is the matter of that other colour.

While I was visiting your work, I asked:

“Glitter, please, why that blue colour? It’s unusual for you”

You answered me like this:

“I felt it, I do not know why. I’m not sure, really: just a feel”

Just a feeling. In fact, from the first images, you add to the red of pain and tragedy, the blue of the cold ice. I did not know that even blue could do so pain.

 

Nearby, when we were walking together, I saw that image of you, dressed in long clothes, and commented: “Like a Greek goddess, but rigid, solid, like made by concrete”. You are blocked, even if the title of the picture is “I come to you”.

Finally, you wanted to bury all your own fragments in that birch wood. Each fragment in placed in its own burial recess. Really cannot we find the whole one who lives there?

Somewhere, among the pictures, you placed a Nietzsche phrase:

The demand to be loved
is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions

It can be true, but we cannot live without love. Yes: we all need it.

Kristine talked herself, also with you, in her logical, rational, sober machinimas. Here you compare her work with the chaos of your overabundant, colourful, dramatic images: heterogeneous drops of strong emotions. In this way you two keep talking, each one in your own way that is almost the opposite of the other.
I like you Glitter and I thank you to have allowed me to enter into you with this wonderful installation. This expo is quite not alike other expos I saw in Second Life.
Here I can see you, your depth, without any protection.
Here I don’t find only nice pics, but much more, also because to see you is to see me too.
Thank you so much for showing your soul, all your soul naked: that’s what I try to do when I write, even if without success.

 

August, 2nd 2017

Italian version