A new art installation at Piedmont Arts will transform the museum’s galleries into a salt marsh habitat using video and sound.

Salt Marsh Suite, an inter-media arts installation and dance performance created by Virginia Tech professors Carol Burch-Brown and Ann Kilkelly will be on display at the museum through February 25.
Based on fieldwork and observation of a North Carolina coastal estuary, Salt Marsh Suite is a video installation that combines art, science and technology to engage viewers in the magical quality of the tidal marsh, while giving a sense of the vulnerability of the marsh habitat.
“Technological tools extend our physical observation and also our capacity to give imaginative form to aspects of the world that we can’t see or know directly,” said Burch-Brown. “Our intention in Salt Marsh Suite is to create an immersive sensory environment that puts viewers in an intimate and digitally created ‘natural’ world where the scale and the viewer’s relationship to that world has been altered.”
In conjunction with Salt Marsh Suite, an interactive exhibit featuring specimens from the collection of the Virginia Museum of Natural History and an exhibit of infrared landscape photographs by Russell Hart will also be on display.
Hart is the former executive editor of American Photo magazine and a professor in the Masters in Digital Photography program at New York City’s School of Visual Arts. He shares photographs from two nature-centric collections, Brink of Light and Water Rights.
Works by David Lunt will be on display in the Lynwood Artists Gallery.
Piedmont Arts is open Tuesday-Friday,10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Saturday,10 a.m.-3 p.m. Admission is free.