ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- Visitors to a new exhibition at The Dali Museum won't just be looking at art. Thanks to virtual reality, they'll be exploring a Dali painting in a dreamy, three-dimensional world that turns art appreciation into an immersive experience.
The exhibition, "Disney and Dali: Architects of the Imagination," tells about the relationship between Salvador Dali, the surrealist artist, and Walt Disney, the American animator and theme-park pioneer.
But the exhibition's highlight comes after visitors have seen the show's paintings, story sketches, correspondence, photos and other artifacts. Visitors are invited to try the virtual reality experience.
Called "Dreams of Dali," the installation takes viewers inside Dali's 1935 painting Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's "Angelus." Users can move around inside the painting, using Oculus Rift headsets to navigate a trippy 3-D environment that includes motifs from other Dali works like elephants, birds, ants and his Lobster Telephone sculpture.
The virtual reality visuals also include a crescent moon, a stone tunnel and an image of rocker Alice Cooper, whom Dali featured in a hologram he created in 1973.
"You actually have a three-dimensional feeling that you're inside a painting," said Jeff Goodby, whose firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners created the virtual reality experience. "It's not just like you're inside a sphere with things being projected. It's actually like there are objects closer and farther away and you're walking amid them."
Disney and Dali met in the 1940s in Hollywood, according to museum director Hank Hine. "Their sensibilities were very connected," Hine said. "They wanted to take art off the palette, out of the canvas and into the world." The exhibition looks at the castle motif that became a symbol of Disney parks, along with Dali's Dream of Venus pavilion from the 1939 New York World's Fair, which some consider a precursor of contemporary installation art.
Disney and Dali also collaborated on a short animated movie, Destino, that was eventually completed by Disney Studios. The 6-minute movie, which can be found on YouTube, features a dancing girl with long dark hair, a sundial motif and a song with the line, "You came along out of a dream. ... You are my destino." Clips will be played within the gallery for the Disney-Dali exhibition and the full short will be shown at the museum's theater.
The show also displays the Dali painting that inspired the virtual reality experience, Archeological Reminiscence of Millet's "Angelus." The surrealist work was Dali's interpretation of a 19th-century painting by Jean-Francois Millet depicting two peasants in a field, heads bowed in prayer. Dali said that his work was a "fantasy during which I imagined sculptures of the two figures in Millet's 'Angelus' carved out of the highest rocks."
Dali "wanted art that took you over," Goodby said. "He wanted to take you away and do something different with your head and that's what this does."
If You Go...
"Disney and Dali," through June 12, the Dali Museum, One Dali Blvd., St. Petersburg, Fla. Open daily 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. and Thursdays until 8 p.m. Adults, $24; discounts for adults 65 and above, military/police/firefighters, teachers, students, children. Info: thedali.org
Travel on 02/07/2016