Subheadline: A contemporary audiovisual installation transforms the experience of John Vanderlyn’s panoramic painting of Versailles, inviting visitors to reconsider the relationship between historical spectacle and the overlooked spaces of modern Paris.
NEW YORK — What happens when a historic artwork designed to immerse viewers in royal grandeur is placed in dialogue with contemporary images of a changing city? At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Canadian multidisciplinary artist David Hartt explores that question in Peripheries, a site-specific installation that brings video, architecture, sound, and historical painting into a dynamic conversation.
On view September 25, 2026, through February 7, 2027, the exhibition occupies Gallery 735 in The Met’s American Wing. Hartt responds to John Vanderlyn’s Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles (1818–19), one of the largest surviving panoramic paintings in the United States. Rather than treating the historic painting as a static object, Hartt activates its surrounding architectural space with contemporary moving images and sound. <Cite refs={[“turn552964search1″,”turn552964search2”]}/>
The result is an installation that asks visitors to look beyond established centers of cultural power and consider the histories, social changes, and alternative perspectives that exist at their margins.
A historical panorama meets contemporary video
Vanderlyn’s panorama was created during a period when panoramic paintings offered audiences an extraordinary form of visual immersion. Displayed in specially designed circular spaces, these works surrounded viewers with expansive landscapes and distant locations, creating the sensation of being transported beyond the immediate environment.
Before photography, cinema, and virtual reality became familiar visual technologies, panoramas offered a distinctive way to experience places that many viewers might never visit themselves. Vanderlyn’s depiction of Versailles presented the former royal residence of the French monarchy through a sweeping, highly detailed view of its palace and gardens.
Hartt approaches this historical spectacle as more than a record of architectural magnificence. His installation examines how images construct ideas about place, how environments communicate social values, and how cultural narratives influence what viewers see and remember.
Two large direct-view LED screens are integrated into the circular gallery. Their imagery echoes and occasionally disrupts the painted panorama, changing the way visitors move through the room and encounter its historical centerpiece. The screens do not simply reproduce the painting; they create a new visual relationship with it.
By placing contemporary imagery beside Vanderlyn’s representation of Versailles, Hartt encourages viewers to consider the changing meanings of landscape, authority, and historical representation.
Looking beyond the center of Paris
The title Peripheries refers to a shift in attention away from established centers and toward the margins, where alternative perspectives and overlooked histories often reside.
Hartt’s footage was filmed across Paris, from Versailles and the Boulevard Périphérique to locations throughout the city center. These sites represent different relationships between the French capital, its built environment, and the people who inhabit it. <Cite refs={[“turn552964search2″,”turn552964search4”]}/>
Versailles evokes the concentrated power of monarchy and the deliberate staging of authority through architecture and landscape. Paris’s central districts, meanwhile, carry layers of political, cultural, and social history. The Boulevard Périphérique—the major ring road around the city—offers another perspective on the relationship between the urban center and its surrounding areas.
Hartt uses these contrasting environments to explore how cities continually reinvent themselves. Landscapes are not fixed backdrops; they are shaped by political decisions, changing social conditions, infrastructure, and competing visions of urban life.
By moving the viewer’s attention between celebrated monuments and less prominent spaces, the installation challenges the assumption that the most visible locations necessarily tell the most complete story. The margins can reveal aspects of history that grand architectural landmarks leave out.
Cinema, photography, and the construction of memory
Hartt’s visual approach draws on the cinematic language of French New Wave filmmaking and the photography of Eugène Atget, whose images documented Paris and its changing streetscapes. These references provide different ways of thinking about how cities are recorded and represented.
French New Wave cinema helped establish a more flexible relationship between filmmaking, everyday life, and urban space. Atget’s photographs, meanwhile, preserve views of Paris that offer historical evidence of an evolving city. Hartt draws on these visual traditions while creating a contemporary moving-image work of his own.
The installation also takes inspiration from Justinien Tribillon’s The Zone: An Alternative History of Paris (2024), a study that offers another framework for understanding the areas surrounding the French capital. This reference reinforces the exhibition’s interest in the spaces beyond conventional historical narratives. <Cite refs={[“turn552964search2”]}/>
Together, these influences shape Peripheries as a meditation on the relationship between images and memory. A photograph, film sequence, or panorama can document a place, but it also frames what becomes visible. Every representation involves choices about where to look, what to include, and what remains outside the picture.
Hartt’s installation makes those choices part of the visitor’s experience. The screens redirect attention, alter sightlines, and encourage movement through the gallery, making the act of looking itself a subject of the work.
Sound as another layer of the installation
Sound plays an important role in the experience. Hartt’s audiovisual installation features an original score by composer and musician Jeff Parker, adding an auditory dimension to the shifting imagery. The work is presented as a two-channel, 4K digital video, running approximately 16 minutes and playing in a continuous synchronized loop. <Cite refs={[“turn552964search1″,”turn552964search2”]}/>
The score helps establish a relationship between the moving images and the surrounding architecture. Rather than experiencing the footage as a sequence of disconnected views, visitors encounter an audiovisual environment in which sound and image contribute to the rhythm of looking.
This approach also distinguishes the installation from a conventional screening. Its placement within the circular gallery means that the historical panorama remains present while the contemporary video unfolds. Visitors experience both at once, navigating between the painted image, the screens, and their own position in the room.
The installation’s structure makes the audience’s movement part of the encounter. Different viewpoints reveal different relationships between the historical artwork and Hartt’s contemporary imagery, preventing the experience from being reduced to a single fixed perspective.
Reconsidering the museum’s historical spaces
Presenting Peripheries within The Met’s American Wing creates another important layer of context. Vanderlyn was an American artist who spent time in Paris and encountered the popularity of panoramic painting before returning to the United States. His choice of Versailles as a subject reflected the international outlook of early American art and the appeal of European cultural landmarks. <Cite refs={[“turn552964search2”]}/>
Hartt’s contemporary response introduces a different perspective into this historical setting. The installation connects an early 19th-century vision of European grandeur with contemporary questions about urban change, representation, and collective memory.
The juxtaposition also demonstrates how museums can bring contemporary artistic practice into dialogue with historical collections. Instead of presenting the past as a closed chapter, the exhibition creates an opportunity to reconsider how historical images continue to influence present-day understandings of place and power.
Organized by Jane Panetta, The Met’s Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Destinee Filmore, Assistant Curator, in collaboration with the American Wing, the commission reflects the museum’s interest in creating connections across periods and artistic disciplines. <Cite refs={[“turn552964search2”]}/>
Finding meaning at the margins
Throughout his practice, Hartt has examined how architecture and landscape embody social values while revealing the political, economic, and cultural forces that shape them. Peripheries brings these concerns into a museum environment, where visitors can consider the relationship between monumental historical representation and the less visible processes that transform cities.
The installation does not simply replace one image of Paris with another. Instead, it encourages viewers to question how places become symbols, whose histories are emphasized, and what can be discovered by looking elsewhere.
At The Met, Hartt’s contemporary imagery unsettles the grandeur of Vanderlyn’s panorama without diminishing its historical significance. The two works coexist in a space where different periods, technologies, and perspectives meet.
Peripheries ultimately proposes that understanding a place requires more than looking at its most celebrated monuments. It means paying attention to the edges, the changing landscapes, and the stories that established narratives may overlook. By turning the museum gallery into a site of shifting perspectives, Hartt invites visitors to reconsider not only Paris and Versailles, but also the ways art shapes our understanding of history itself.
