Phoenix Art Museum exhibition follows a monarch butterfly's migration through mixed reality
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There's a new exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum opening on Saturday that doesn't involve art on the walls.
Instead, museum goers walk into a giant, pitch black room with black-painted walls and are given a headset to wear. It's not a virtual reality headset, per se, but more of a mixed-reality headset.
Once the headset adjusts to your eyes, a monarch butterfly will appear, flying around you.
The exhibition is called "Methuselah," and The Show got to try it out earlier this week. It’s by Cuban conceptual artist Reynier Leyva Novo and was brought to the Valley by Phoenix Art Museum’s curator-at-large Olga Viso.
The idea is to virtually track a single monarch butterfly in real time on its annual 6,000-mile journey from Mexico, across the United States and into Canada. But it’s not just a monarch butterfly being represented in the exhibition.
Novo created the piece while he was in the process of migrating himself to the United States from his home country. He had to go through two different countries to get here and he told The Show, he wished he was this butterfly at times. The Show sat down with Novo and Viso at the museum to talk more about the exhibition.
