It’s not every day you get to explore a surreal, space-age landscape without leaving St. Louis County. The new Van McElwee: Time Fork exhibit at Laumeier Sculpture Park in Sunset Hills takes visitors through imagined structures placed virtually within the physical landscape and accessed via a free mobile app.

The project, organized as a walking tour of the park viewed through the lens of technology, imagines what might have happened if time branched 1,000 years ago to create a parallel world. In McElwee’s installation, he uses augmented reality to reveal a settlement that exists in that parallel or future world, overlapping what we know as Laumeier Sculpture Park.

“We see structures that could be under construction or in ruins; they could have a ritual, municipal, or even industrial function,” said McElwee, a St. Louis multi-media artist. “Using phones or tablets as windows, viewers can explore these mysteries, inside and out.”

Time Fork is just one component of Laumeier’s thematic Art & Global Change exhibit, which runs through 2021.