Table of Contents
“For more than a year, we have become accustomed to wearing masks. And the more we hide our emotions from others, the more sadness, fear and anger grow within us.
But this paper or fabric mask hides the mask we have been wearing for millennia. Smooth and smiling portraits, posed, placed in the palm of the other’s hand to satisfy the norm and our concern for self-perfection.
I took a rusty knife and scratched the surface of the icy virtual faces I’ve been taking pictures of over the past few months. Underneath were real faces, aged flesh, fetid smells, sorrows, long millennial stories of billions of human beings swarming and crawling on the face of the earth, perhaps looking for something that is missing: but what the hell is missing? What are we missing so much? What makes us starve so?” – Milena Carbone
New Berlin Park Event Area Teleport
The exhibition can be visited till May 31
Milena Carbone´s Bio
Milena Carbone is a French artist born in 1992 in Strasbourg. She has written and photographed since the age of 16. In 2010, she entered university where she studied psychology.
In 2012, her life changed. She met the love of her life which only lasted forty days. She reads the IPCC reports and realizes the risk of the collapse of civilization, sacrificed on the altar of ignorance and greed.
In 2013, she cut short her studies, and did an accelerated course in computer graphics. She worked for two years in an advertising agency, and in 2015 started out as a freelance graphic designer.
Between 2017 and 2019, artist friends encouraged her to publish her texts and to exhibit her photographs. She participated in two exhibitions of artists’ collectives where she presented photographs associated with short stories.
In mid 2019, she signed up for Second Life. She discovered its artistic potential and since then has devoted all her free time to creation, associating, as in real life, images and texts.
Milena Carbone is a fiction in which, as in any artistic work, biographical and imaginary elements are mixed.
Artistic Project in Second Life
Milena Carbone’s artistic project on Second Life is the continuation of her work in RL. Its specificity is based on anonymity, an important component of this virtual world.
By accepting the rule of the “double” (the real “I” and the virtual “I”), Milena Carbone includes herself in her artwork : she is fiction and questions her place in the world and the scope of her word.
By asking the question: “Who speaks in Second Life?”, Milena Carbone, author and fiction, returns this question to us in our real life: Who speaks ? How and why is it that an “I” appears capable of observing, from the inside, the universe that created it ? How can we ignore our ignorance to the point of destroying ourselves ? How does our language, limited and discontinuous, lose us in sufficiency?
Her creative process is iterative: some of her images inspire her stories and these stories modify the development of the image, which itself transforms the story.
The phase of editing is very important. It combines the raw image of Second Life with a black and white layer and textures. These different photoshop layers represent, for Milena Carbone, “layers of meaning”.
The Recurring Themes in Milena Carbone´s work
Her main themes are:
- The collapse of humanism, and even humanity;
- Fiction, reality and consciousness
- Poetry of science and spirituality;
- The advanced civilization of trees;
- The assumption that God could have been an alcoholic.
To feed her artistic project, she draws inspiration from science, psychology, philosophy and religions.
Her favorite subjects are female avatars and / or natural or urban landscapes. She rarely takes herself as the subject of her images preferring to discover model avatars with attitude
Where to find Milena Carbone´s artwork
Milena Carbone has her own art galleries : The Carbone Gallery, which shows her exhibitions and guest artists.
The Carbone Gallery @Noir´Wen City
Join The Carbone Gallery Group in Second Life
Flickr – Milena Carbone´s writing on Medium
