Free Expression

 Summer time, and the livin' is easy... if by living you mean taking a wander around Opensim and seeing some beautiful and meaningful art, and being able to snag a lot of gorgeous original freebies. The talent and the generosity of this artist are so well known in Opensim, and you probably guessed who's being featured just by looking at the photos. 

Cube, Cherry Freebies, Pangea  Grid

In her fifteen years in Opensim, on Francogrid and here and there on a dozen other grids, not to mention her years in SL before and during her Opensim sojourn, Cherry Manga has never failed to delight us and amaze with her spirit and her vision of both the Opensim community, and of her own RL battles. So many can relate to her artwork expressing the frustration of illness and the toll it takes on mind and body. Despite that, her art is capable of wild flights of fantasy,  of beauty and tenderness,  of dreams and nightmares, into the past and into a techno future.

Cherry Freebies is a region on Pangea grid a Mecca for art sims, and thus an ideal place for her gallery slash 'shop' - Cherry long ago embraced the inherent nature of Opensim, and made her creations full perms - and perhaps the most shocking part of this region is that it's not a VAR. Showing off her incredible ability, Cherry has managed to fit in a whole range of very different builds, each one expressive, touching, thoughtful, inspiring, memorable. All that and you get to take home some of the bits!  

This is the landing point, at ground level; from here you can teleport to the various installations, ranging from the earliest, Fest'Avi, all the way up to Cloudy Ride, the most recent addition. Cherry's skills have been in demand in both SL and Opensim, often for specific events, so some of the things you'll see here have been feted on other grids in the past, this is a way to revisit and rediscover, and maybe catch up on stuff you missed. 

Naturally this post isn't going to show you every nook and cranny on this sim, or list the mind boggling amount of gorgeous assets you can Take Copy or Buy here - the whole point is to get you to visit for yourself and form your own impressions and memories. 

From the gentle childhood confection of Cloudy Ride to the jagged gestures of the animesh on Void, you'll feel like you've been travelling across a whole grid, not a single sim. Such is Cherry's range.

Another lovely installation is Brush, with ists silvey gold feel - and don't forget to have the audio on, that's an essential part of multimedia builds, setting the tone through tones, of course.

The animated flower shown here in the dark landscape of Brush is a ciguë or Hemlock. That poison plant made famous by Socrates is, paradoxically, a bright point in this ghostly garden; a way out of a desperate state? Or is it fairer to say, the creation of the plant exorcises the need to seek it in the real world? Maybe it's all about the healing effect of pixels. Worth a thought. 

The monochrome build Void gives you the feeling that you're witnessing a whole load of cubes melting into something far more organic. on each isolated platform, far deeper than the upper side would suggest, and with cascading connections between the light and dark art of each, you find figures posing, dancing, some recognizable, some mysteriously strange.

There's plenty of joy here too though. Cloudy Ride is in PBR and there's a warning about not seeing things as lovely as they ought to be, if you haven't updated your viewer, but on my ancient 6.6.17 it still looked pretty good and much of it is free to take, including these super cute child animeshes at Cloudy Ride, where you'll even find the EEP available to take, at the arrival point.

HG Address: pangeagrid.de:8002:Cherry Freebies