Review by Gary Zabel, PhD, U Mass Boston

Although she is only 21 years old and has been involved in Second Life for little more than a year, the young woman behind the avatar, Feathers Boa, has already created a substantial and important body of work in this new virtual medium. Her technical facility is evident whether she is sculpting with prims using Second Life tools, creating montages of found real-life objects in Photoshop, or making unique, digitally generated three-dimensional images with programs like Cinema 4D.

For all her expertise, however, her technical virtuosity is never an end in itself, but the vehicle for communicating a depth of feeling that ranges from the most playful lightheartedness to the darkest spiritual states. In her most profound works, she expresses the extremes of this affective range in elaborating a single theme.

Consider, for example, the giant toy robots she has created in her outdoor gallery on Caerleon Isle. With their beating hearts, revolving brains, and igniting power packs, they bring us back to those charmed moments of childhood when joy and imagination were fused in play. But one of her enormous toys lies in pieces on the ground.The robot has fallen, broken apart, and its heart has stopped beating, an emblem of the downfall of everything beautiful and free. In the robot installation as a whole, these two aspects of experience are not disconnected. The elements of darkness and joy are linked in the promise of a fragile redemption, one that must be wrested, perhaps only temporarily, from the most difficult moments of our lives.

Many of the artist's remarkable interactive works also convey this subtle theme. For example, in the piece titled "Frigid," a voluptuous nude is trapped in the machinery of what appears to be a gigantic refrigeration unit.There is a powerful life-force in her full breasts and rounded hips and thighs, but her living flesh is frozen, encased in a thin layer of ice. The nude stretches her arms out toward the viewer pleading for release, but as the viewer approaches the piece, its icy surface projects beyond the picture plane, both reinforcing and overwhelming the imploring gesture. Wewant to reach into the artwork, take the frozen woman by the hand, pull her out and sit with her by the fire, but redemptionis not that easily won.We can free one another from lonely imprisonment in the depths of our insular selves - so the artistseems to say - but it will require a love that goes beyond momentary inclination.

The sensitive viewer will undoubtedly discover treasures in the artist's work that exceed what I have described. Like all genuine art, her creations resist easy paraphrase. But we are fortunate to have in Second Life an artist who challenges our perceptive abilities with material so richly significant. She promises nothing less than to illuminate a human condition in which vulnerability and transcendence are inseparably intertwined.