Through the doors of the First Financial Music Hall lives the dark, beating landscape of AstroZone, transporting those bold enough to a strange, new world.
The Murphy Arts District, in partnership with Crystal Bridges, brought Claire Ashley's inflatable sculpture exhibit to life to be displayed between Feb. 1 and April 4.
The exhibit will also be featured in lesson plans for about 6,000 students in local school districts, complete with grade-level appropriate vocabulary and a writing contest where students from each grade can receive $100.
"This is the most exciting project I have ever worked on," said Gay Bechtelheimer, former El Dorado Public School Educator of the Year (2014).
Bechtelheimer worked with MAD and surrounding districts to help bring this exhibit in front of educators.
"To see it at its very beginning and to be a part of the programming and the planning for the programming, to visit with the superintendents, to tell them the value of this and to see their appreciation and their want to be here," she said, "it's emotional to me. It's very exciting. It's a touchstone in my career."
Students will begin visiting AstroZone Monday.
Bechtelheimer said students will be walked through the exhibit and then taken to two separate classroom areas to physically write down their thoughts with a prompt in mind. The work students complete will go through their teachers in order to be selected for the contest.
"If schools don't take the opportunity to bring their children to see things like this, so many children will never know that wonders like this exist, so it has to come through the schools," Bechtelheimer said. "[Schools] are a very integral part, they are a key player in the success of this exhibition … and their administrators and their educators. It's all an integrated approach."
However, the education doesn't stop there. There also will be a free discussion open to the community exploring the origins of abstract art and how it evolved from Europe to the United States, as well as a free workshop where families can create their own piece of art.
The exhibit, or installation, hosts the work of Claire Ashley, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Contemporary Practices and Painting and Drawing departments and is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland.
Ashley previously visited El Dorado in October to discuss her art as well as to work with El Dorado High School AP (Advanced Placement) art students to create their own inflatable sculptures.
She said it's wonderful to see the exhibit come to life, somewhat literally.
"Obviously there are certain rules we want to make sure [people are] maintaining, but it's lovely to see them engage with the work in a live, active, happy way," Ashley said. "To sort of see that what you hoped is actually happening in terms of how the work is operating, it's always really satisfying to see its success."
Ashley said she likes to think of the exhibit as a landscape of another world that people will be able to explore.
Not only does she think of each sculpture as its own piece, but she thinks of the entire exhibit as a holistic piece of art. Almost everything people will see is Ashley's own creation, from the sculptures and lighting design to the projections inside some of the sculptures.
However, the audio, which often sounds like growling, playing from four speakers in each corner is entirely the work of Joshua Patterson.
Ashley said Patterson is trained in throat singing, so a lot of the sounds people will hear is Patterson's own voice. She said it adds another layer to the exhibit.
"He made five different tracks, so each of them are quite spacious," Ashley said. "There's a lot of downtime in one corner but it gets picked up in the other corner. I like that it's got this sort of very elongated kind of quality to it."
AstroZone will be open to the public beginning today at 10 a.m. and is free to attend. There also will be multiple performances opening day, including musical performances at 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. in the music hall and a Ruddy-Udder performance at 2 p.m. in the MAD Amphitheater.