Do you enjoy museums and art galleries? 3D Interactive Art Exhibitions & Museums are becoming a worldwide phenomenon. This video shows some of the artwork I have created for my museum.
The exhibition demonstrates that the tradition of European drawing and painting can be employed to create new and innovative works. It pleases me to see how curiosity about the images can lead young people to discover this visual patrimony. The iconic images of our past are too often buried in the mass of imagery we create.
The 3D Museum of Wonders is a picture gallery devoted to 3-dimensional interactive illusions. “Three-Dimensional Pavement Art” in the western world and “Trick Art” in Asia were both invented at the same time and have grown in popularity at astounding rates. My permanent interactive venue, new to 3D pavement art, is a new way of delighting and challenging a broad multicultural public. A collection of my existing pavement art images provides many of the exhibits. The museum utilizes current printing technology to incorporate the best of digital imaging into artworks that the public can walk on and touch. The works are still all created by hand, but thanks to digital technology, the surfaces are suitably “touchable” for permanent and interactive displays.
New to the exhibition is a “Grand Gallery” of interactive masterpieces. This gallery is different from existing Asian “Trick Art” museums in that it incorporates an architectural framework that becomes part of the illusion. Kazumune Kenju, who opened the first “Trick Art” Museum in Japan, included a “parody series”(as translated from Japanese), of famous paintings in 1988, which became a staple of Trick Art museums throughout Asia ever since. The word “parody” may be an inadequate translation of the Japanese term, as his pieces do not intend to satirize the original artworks. The artist actually fell to his death while completing an enormous 2/3 scale copy of (and in homage to) Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.
The irony is a commentary on the precious way in which works we treat artworks in museums, which creates a distance between them and the public. Making copies of great masterpieces has also been a staple of the pavement artist’s repertoire, probably for centuries. The re-creation of iconic works in a public space is, therefore, not an innovation in the history of pavement art.
Much of the success of both Trick Art and 3D Pavement Art is due to the Internet and social media. The interactive aspects of both venues have responded to feedback from the public. They share in common the fact that the imagery most often includes specific areas to incorporate the public. To date, sizeable interactive art museums have opened in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Turkey, and the Philippines. To date, all of the exhibitions and museums except mine employ teams of painters. As the video shows, my exhibitions & Museums are unique in that they contain the work of a single artist.
As the 3D interactive concept moves toward the west, it will be interesting to see whether teams of artists will still create the exhibits or whether they will feature the works of a single artist. My 3D Gallery Of Wonders remains the first exhibition entirely designed and executed by an individual artist. As such, it represents a new approach to the venue. I hope that illusion museums will become a particularly exciting development for other artists, combining the atmosphere of an art gallery with the fun of interactivity.
The desire to communicate is foremost in my artistic agenda, and because of this, interactive art has always been fascinating to me. To the best of my knowledge, few art forms have the universal appeal or the broad cultural demographic that interactive art enjoys. Traditionally, street painting has been a form of performance art. It has always been considered fine art but was traditionally impermanent. This impermanence made it impossible to market the images as art gallery products. 3D Interactive Art lends itself to digital art, and therefore this limitation will likely disappear.
To read further, continue to my Museum & Exhibition page.
