THE ART PERSPECTIVE

Each piece, ECLIPSE Magazine discovers, reviews and highlights the work of some of the most creative and talented artists on the grid, offering a fresh perspective in the vibrant and vast world of the arts.

For this month’s feature, Gidge Uriza visits Whiskey Monday’s two features at The GBTH Project: In Other Wor(L)ds and My Tweets as Pictures.

the art perspective

I sometimes hesitate to feature personal friends but there are times that the talent of one’s friends simply cannot be overlooked forever. A dear friend in both worlds, Whiskey Monday has two features in the 2D gallery at The GBTH Project and each is a dip into the art that words inspire, and words themselves as art.

In the first exhibit - In Other Wor(L)ds, Whiskey shares pages from her personal journals and the artwork they inspired. Her journals are snippets of thought, quotes she’s heard and quotes she’s said, simply page after page of stream of consciousness where her brain is sorting through its joy and its trauma. Sometimes as writers we simply must get the words out, if only to see if we need to do anything more with them after that.

To view the journal pages that inspired the art while at the exhibit you simply click and hold and the journal pages appear the art.

For Whiskey, sometimes the words inspire art and we are graced with those images. What we do with them next is of course up to us. Her works often speak to isolation, alienation, and the absurdity of life.

She shares notes of sorrow, of grief and idle musing the way one might simply pass the potatoes at a family dinner. You’ve been invited in, and you are welcome to a helping of words that may startle or move you. They give you more to consider than just the image they inspired. You’re drawn into an intensely personal moment where she shares the darkness, the pain and the meandering of her mind and then you can draw your own conclusions about how the image she chooses to portray plays out in the context of the words on the page. Which words led her to that image? How deeply does the image connect with the pain of the words you read? It’s up to you. Whiskey isn’t telling.

The second part of the installation “My Tweets as Pictures” is a precursor to the current exhibit. In the second exhibit she’s taken her tweets from the past and had created images in the context of the tweet. They’re vibrant, funny, and give you pause as some are poignant just when you’ve had a giggle at the previous work. From 2012 to 2014 she created these pieces and describes it as the true early version of In Other Wor(L)ds. They are as fresh and funny today as they were back then. You can see in these images the foundations of her current works.

The images are far more varied in the “My Tweets as Pictures” exhibit in terms of form, color and composition. Each one exists on it’s own without a strong visual connection to the others other than the fact that they emanate from short tweets from a single author. Each one then is its own story, rather than a piece connected by a thread to others.

I highly recommend this exhibit to stop and consider the power of words to influence images, and vice versa. It’s a beautiful tribute to the power of words and the value of letting them out to stand witness to our pain, our love and our existence.

The GBTH Project is an SL-based experimental arts space consisting of 8+ dedicated gallery spaces. To GBTH (Grab By The Horns) is to take courageous initiative in guiding the boundlessness of artistry, making the conceptual tangible. Here they facilitate artists and makers alike to actualize installation, photographic, sculptural, and community-based works.