Swimmer's Canyon — VR artwork by Sara Ludy, nocturnal canyon landscape with ethereal light
Curated Exhibition · Art Mûr · July–August 2022

Sara Ludy Swimmer’s Canyon

Dates
July 16 – August 27, 2022
Medium
Virtual Reality
Venue
Galerie Art Mûr, Montreal
Curator
Samuel Arsenault-Brassard

A VR journey through a star-filled canyon to a swimming hole. The experience begins on a float drifting under fireworks, surrounded by scattered artifacts and phenomena: a portal, a pineapple, shifting sounds, something running, spatial energies.

Throughout the thirty-minute trip, visitors are paraded through a hazy world of symbols and strange phenomena. Anomalies appear tied to an evolving soundscape that implies a story, a series of secrets, a transformation. There is an implication that an entity beyond our understanding created these worlds for us to explore. Another civilization that found human relics, who now stand as uncanny objects in a new reality.

Ludy’s work loosens up reality and asks us to consider the world of the invisible. The canyon environment embraces solid forms but veers toward the immaterial and the spiritual: mists, bursts of light, glass refractions, breaks within reality. It is an architecture of feelings, of things we cannot articulate. The balance between real-feeling and artificial is deliberate and shifting—some surfaces break, decay, are purposely fake, exposing the materiality of the digital world itself: its cheap mirages, its unique quirks. The result is a triangulation between reality, digital space, and a dreamy surreality—a hybrid territory that feels like entering a painting for half an hour.

Swimmer's Canyon — VR screenshot, nocturnal landscape with ethereal light and surreal elements
Swimmer's Canyon — VR screenshot, canyon environment with mysterious structures and spatial phenomena
Swimmer's Canyon — VR screenshot, descent into the canyon, shifting atmosphere and distant lights

At the Gallery

Visitors at Galerie Art Mûr experiencing Swimmer’s Canyon on the round blue carpet that defined the installation’s physical space—a soft island in the white gallery, inviting visitors to sit, recline, and drift into Ludy’s world. Photos by Mike Patten.

Swimmer's Canyon installation at Galerie Art Mûr — wide shot showing the round blue carpet, title text on wall, and VR setup
Visitor reclining on the round blue carpet experiencing Swimmer's Canyon VR at Galerie Art Mûr