Before you take in the most recent exhibit at Mankato’s Carnegie Art Center, it might be a good idea to leave at the door any preconceived notions about what belongs on a gallery wall.
Because, chances are, you’ve never seen an exhibit quite like this.
On display now through the end of March is a rather surreal series of works by twin brothers Dave and Steve Ryan called “Endless Moil.” The exhibit includes a pointed finger statuette in the fireplace room that follows you — points directly at you, actually — as you move around it. One ceiling in the main room is a rotating projected sequence of mathematical symbols.
But the biggest display is on the curved wall at the back of the main room. Using three projectors, an abstract collection of colors and shapes nearly fills the entirety of the wall. Look once and look away and your impression of the work is one of wonder and blended color.
Look back again a few seconds later, and you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks on you.
Stare at one spot on the projected image and you see what’s happening. The image is constantly changing, but doing so ever so slowly. The changes are so gradual, in fact, that you almost find yourself mesmerized; you know it’s changing, but you never actually see any change. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery built on a foundation of computer coding.
“It’s all coding,” says Dave Ryan. “My background was in filmmaking and I picked up programming along the way.”
Ryan wrote the computer code that provides the magic for the display. He says the code directs the program to pull varying colors from a collection of photos. The program then colors shapes based on those photos. Human silhouettes appear in random places.
And no matter how many times you look at it, you’ll never see the exact same image twice.
“The idea is that it changes slowly enough so that you can’t really see it, but you notice it’s changing,” Ryan says. “That’s the experiential goal; to create images that change slowly enough that look like still images, but they’re really constantly changing all the time.”
This isn’t a new endeavor for Ryan. A faculty member at Hamline University — he in fact started the university’s digital arts program — he’s been toying with this unique brand of visual art for about 20 years. This is the first time he’s shown this type of work in Mankato.
The finger in the fireplace room, he says, is solely the work of his brother, Steve.
“It’s sort of trying to take on the idea of blame and or fame,” he says. “We found that at the opening that people either wanted to be pointed out or didn’t want to be pointed out, which is kind of interesting.”