Diomita Maurer’s Blog

Following Rig Torok’s blog I came across “Onceagain Art Gallery” and visited it on January 2nd. Onceagain Art Gallery is owned by onceagain (Manoji Yachvili). In the landmark profile you find a short description:
“Hello! This is a small art gallery dedicated to women where exhibitions of various kinds will be exhibited on a regular basis.
If you want to be part of it, send a note to Manoji Yachvili with your references and a link where I can see your work.“

onceagain (Manoji Yachvili) is in Second Life for more than 14 years. She “likes photography, art, landscapes, animals, visiting strange places, most of these things she also does in RL”. You find more of her also on her flickr account.

Impressions of Onceagain Art Gallery (1) – Main building and exhibition “Kaleidoscope”

Her Onceagain Art Gallery consists of several parts. The main building, where you land, features Onceagain’s own art and some pieces of her art collection. Right at the entrance you find a teleporter board that leads you to other buildings featuring “Private Collection” (Onceagain’s art collection), “Personal Exhibit” (another larger exhibtion of Onceagain) and “Artist of the month”. The latter did teleport me to an empty skybox, hence I assume there’s just no artist featured at this particular time of the year. On the ground level you can also see 3D sculptures and art objects embedded in a nice garden.

My visit started at the main building. On the ground floor is an exhibtion titled “Kaleidoscope”. Onceagain wrote about it:
“Thinking of the joy I felt as a child when I laid my eyes on the kaleidoscope and with a simple gesture of rotation thanks to those fragemnts of coloured glass I created a new world, precise, clean, an endless array of colourful emotions and grace.
In out life time each one of us must take their pieces and put them back together again to be able to look at his own inner world.
In the life time of this society fragments of an uncertain reality, often confused, rich but fragile, where past, present and future seem to overlap in mposed velocity, the persuit of bauty in a game of fragmetns of light allows me to expand the senses, give peace to the mind, feed my eyes to the vision of tomorrow.
This is the thought that has noursihed my creativity for this project: the need to catch a glimpse of a possible hope for the revival of beauty in this world, the desire to look with brght eyes of adult reality and with enlightened eyes of a child its possible future.“

Impressions of Onceagain Art Gallery (2) – Exhibition “Kaleidoscope” – collected art on the 2nd floor

The pictures all consist of 2 pictures, on the left side a RL picture of something messed up, broken, trist and on the right side the picture of a kaleidoscope structure, where the structure repeats elements of the picture on the right. It conjured a smile on my face when I saw the similarities and I can understand what Onceagain wants to express. Well done!

Upstairs are some pieces of Onceagain’s art collection, in particular some objects of Mistero Hifeng. And there’s one room featuring Onceagain’s horse pictures. But these are not just horse pictures, Onceagain processed them and compared them with pictures of renowned RL artists. She wrote about them:
“We all have images archived, even at an unconscious level, models which we refer to because any work aof art is an act of communication involving a user, someone who enters into conversation with what is being shown.
Thus on reseeing a photo of my mare, I naturally associated it with a picture I began composing this project. Whenever an image reminding me of an artist came my way, I would set it aside, lke a jigsaw piece intent on arranging the end result, a part of which is here on display; thus, creating a personal dialogue with the works present in one’s memory by means of photographs.“

Impressions of Onceagain Art Gallery (3) – Exhibition “horse pictures” on the 2nd floor

Again the direct comparison is intriguing!

I took the teleport board and visited the “Private Collection” which is in a separate building. You could also walk through the garden to get there and see the outdoor art objects on your way. I visited just shortly, the list of artists she collected is quite long and I know and worte about some of them: Bryn Oh, Caly Applewhyte, DixMix Source, Eupalinos Ugajin, Lika Cameo and many others.

Finally there’s another exhibtion of Onceagain in a gallery up in the skies named “NOMORE”, reached with the teleport to “Personal Exhibit”. It is really a quite personal exhibition and covers a theme, i was not aware of at all. Onceagain wrote:
“NOMORE interlaces the story of the serious illness of the palm trees, caused by the red weevil, among the inexitent and sick relationship with my father and the joyful synergy experienced by me with this kind of trees during the childhood spent in the “Boulevard Palm” in Nervi, a distrct of Genova, the which I’m particular fond of.
NOMORE was born slowly, it evolves as thought mature, white the experence is lived. With the passage of time, I’ve collectd refrelctions, informations, old photographs, creating my iconic graphic elements, assembled in this project with a contemporary and complete overview“

Impressions of Onceagain Art Gallery (4) Onceagain’s exhibition “NOMORE”

Onceagain Art Gallery provides a unique art experience in Second Life. It combines art objects created in and for Second Life in the garden area and the art collection with exhibition space featuring onceagain (Manoji Yachvili)’s own art. Onceagain succeeds to explain and describe her thoughts when she sees a RL photograph and what pictures this photograph brings up in her mind. The direct comparison is intriguing. Thank you for your art, Onceagain!

Onceagain Art Gallery
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Peaceful%20Mountains/210/82/24
Rig Torok’s blogpost about “Onceagain Art Gallery”
http://rigtorok.blogspot.com/2022/01/peaceful-mountains-2022.html
onceagain (Manoji Yachvili)’s flickr
https://www.flickr.com/photos/69389809@N03/