Barnorama All Fun In The Barn
Charles Laurence Proulx, the architect behind the “Moving Dunes” and co-founder of NÓS, said that the idea came as the team had to create “a bi-dimensional installation to maintain vehicle access across the street, but we wanted to give the street a topography, a volume.” The team was inspired by “the graphic technique of cubism to create the illusion (trompe-l’oeil) of depth.”
It bends the viewer’s perspective in such a way that the Avenue de Musée street appears to be moving
Charles also recounted the whole process from the concept to the final installment. “First, we did a 3D model of the topography and spheres with our architectural modeling tool and with a simple pattern applied to the topography. Then, we worked with the museum to choose a graphic pattern and colors to match the exhibition branding and identity.”
Finally, the team at NÓS did a real-scale productions drawing. “At last, we mapped the pattern on the the street as a giant stencil.”
The mural was inspired by cubism and created by Canadian architecture firm NÓS
Charles said that the project came about as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts proposed an artwork on this street, Avenue de Musée, which is right next to the museum. It was created as extension of the temporary exhibit “From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-face Picasso, Past and Present at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA).” Just like cubist painters, the artwork is built to question the role of perspective in visual representation.
One of the methods used to create the distorted sense in the piece is “anamorphosis.” The term refers to “the distortion of the subject reconfiguring itself according to the position of the body in space.” Moreover, “through this process, ‘Moving Dunes’ introduces the public to the essence of this approach in a playful way.”
As the viewer moves, the sand shapes are reversed, and the ground comes alive
The optical piece was designed by a team of 4 artists working at NÓS, which is a Montreal-based company that brings together professional architects and artists attached to several disciplines and diverse cultures in order to share and innovate through common projects. The overall budget for the piece was $50,000, according to the statement.
cool so it moves. id like to go there and move some lines to make it differnt. thats cool that they are movable. why arent there more pictures of people moving the moving dunes. i mean for a moving dune then youd think there woould be tons of pictures of people making their own lines to move. id wanna move some to one side and move some to the other side to move. thats alot of stuff to move if you wanna play with the moving sands. people should learn to come up with better names now they are parasiting stuff in real life to get attention. lots of people thought it was actually movable and were disappointed when it was just a misleading name to get attention. poeple starting to say it hurts the eyes to walk along it hahahaha