Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience is coming to Ottawa’s Aberdeen Pavilion in Lansdowne Park this summer, sponsored by RBC and organized by Ottawa Bluesfest.
The audio-visual art installation will feature contemporary acoustic music and animated projections of Van Gogh’s artwork displayed in a 360-degree space, reaching from the ceiling to the floor.
The exhibit will feature Van Gogh’s most famous pieces including; Starry Night, Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, Almond blossoms, and Café Terrace at Night.
Mathieu St-Arnaud is the creative director at Normal Studio, a multimedia company based in Montréal where the exhibit was created. He said his team was inspired by Van Gogh’s life to create this exhibit.
St-Arnaud said Van Gogh was able to capture the beauty of everyday life by conveying emotions of wonder and peacefulness through his work.
“The message of this [exhibit] is to see beauty where it is, and that is also a recurring theme in Van Gogh’s artwork. He saw beauty in every day,” St-Arnaud said.
The art installation took three months for a team of 12 animators to create. St-Arnaud said the age of Van Gogh’s work presented a challenge to his team.
“While creating it, we wanted to stick to Van Gogh’s colour palette as closely as possible, which was a bit hard to do since museum artworks age and the pigments are known to fade over time,” he said.
St-Arnaud added the art installation was designed to resonate with guests of all ages and will give them the opportunity to envelop themselves in Van Gogh’s mind and emotions.
The organizers of this event are the same team behind Ottawa Bluesfest. This will be the first time the festival presents audio-visual art instead of the traditional concerts it’s known for, since Bluesfest has once again been postponed due to COVID-19.
Mark Monahan, the executive and artistic director of Bluesfest, said he’s looking forward to having the people of Ottawa journey through the exhibit after seeing it travel to several other cities, such as Miami and Calgary.
“[The exhibition is] definitely something Bluesfest has not done before. It will be something that resonates well with the Ottawa crowd,” said Monahan.
Monahan said he hopes this event will provide Ottawans some respite during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is an immersive digital exhibit, relatively new and a revival in the art world. The crowd is very diverse—a lot of younger people, and it is more accessible. It’s less intimidating than walking through an art gallery,” Monahan said.
On the websites of the Beyond Van Gogh exhibit in other cities, an open call for social media influencers willing to promote the event has been put out.
Mitchell Frank, an associate professor in Carleton’s art and architectural history department, said he thinks the concept of being exposed to art through social media is here to stay.
“You can be taking a photograph of this huge Van Gogh behind you and posting it on Instagram or other places, [which] takes away audiences from more traditional museums. But this is the way the world is going now, and people are going to learn about things in different ways,” Frank said.
Frank said he hopes that people experience this non-traditional exhibit as it will be a new way to learn about Van Gogh’s life.
“If these kinds of things promote someone to go and read Van Gogh’s autobiography and go to the museum and look at the paintings, [then] it could be very encouraging to think about Van Gogh in different ways,” Frank said.
St-Arnaud said this art installation is meant to overwhelm the senses. He said he believes everyone, whether or not they’re familiar with Van Gogh’s work, will be able to enjoy the reintroduction the exhibition provides.
For people intimately familiar with Van Gogh’s work, St-Arnaud said they should keep an eye out for easter eggs or hidden messages scattered throughout the exhibit.
Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience art installation will run from August 5 to September 16 at the Aberdeen Pavilion. Tickets can be purchased on the exhibit website.
Featured image by RBC.
