Sometimes a squiggle is more than just a squiggle.
What looks like a giant worm, made of purple, blue, green, yellow and pink blobs piled atop of each other, is positioned on steel rods in front of the south Minneapolis home that houses the Porch Gallery.
"This is what came out of it," said artist Mark Schoening, whose gallery is literally on his porch. "We're up to 90 e-mails with the creative team. … This was way more than just building a sculpture."
That's because this seemingly benign squiggle was based on "Chromie Squiggle," the first project created for Art Blocks, a blockchain technology company that hosts artists' NFTs. It actually didn't exist in the physical realm — the original squiggle was produced using generative code and is part of an edition of 10,000.
Now it's something of an advertisement for Texas-based Art Blocks, which Schoening and his wife, Dawn, discovered while passing through the Southwest during the height of the pandemic.
Visitors walk up the steps to the porch, which is painted with rainbow squiggle designs, then peer through the windows to view an exhibition called "Vortex" that opened Thursday evening. Two monitors in a front room display a series of 1,000 animation NFTs by artist Jen Stark, all of them hosted by Art Blocks — and already sold.
Each has its own wild psychedelic design: colorful explosions, zig-zag-filled black holes to disappear into, wavy ripples of concentric circles, something between the apocalypse and natural forms.
To learn more about the NFTs, visitors can scan a QR code located on the wall, or grab an Art Blocks brochure to look through as they sit on a bench covered in zig-zag rainbows.
