Refresh: The Space in Between A Screen and A Body examines ways in which we embody virtual spaces and digital technology. This two-person exhibition at Metropolitan State University’s Gordon Parks Gallery features Karst, a virtual reality artwork by new media artist Snow Yunxue Fu, and original choreography by dancer/visual artist Lela Pierce.

This exhibition re-imagines the gallery as a digital space: a web page that is updated/refreshed with new “data” (motions, memories, layers of meaning, recordings of the virtual reality world and the performances). Karst is multi-level virtual reality visual and sound experience/artwork that creates liminal spaces in between the representational and the theatrical. Through projections, Pierce’s unique exploration of Karst is broadcast onto her body and on walls of the Gordon Parks Gallery; through motion sensors and video, her physical presence is transformed from bodily memories to a flux of data. In Refresh, Pierce’s dancing body is a breathing screen, a public platform for showcasing a world of physically inaccessible wonders that Fu recreated in VR.

Virtual reality engages an individual in a semi-passive interaction in which sight and sound is overwhelmed, and the physical body easily forgotten as such. As the virtual reality experience is typically internal and limited to those who possess the VR equipment, Refresh seeks to democratize experience by bringing the internal outwards.

Gallery doors are currently closed to the public. The gallery is located at the university’s Saint Paul Campus on the third floor of the Library and Learning Center, 645 East Seventh Street. For more information about the exhibit, contact Zoe Cinel, Interim Gallery Director, at 651-246-2086.