If haunted houses leave you cold but you love playing with the idea of death —and you don't mind haunting images that stay with you for a few nights – the Gallery of Mortality at Gulfport's City of Imagination, 2726 54th St. S., is the place to go. Once there, you'll be immersed in the visuals of Master of Mortality Dean Wick, who has created interpretations of death as portrayed by the master of macabre, Edgar Allen Poe.
Wick, who has a theatrical background and loves a good horror story, offers up 10 chilling "death dioramas" at the City of Imagination, a creative space just off Gulfport's well-worn arts path. He's recreated moments from Poe's works, and says he's inspired by being closer to death.
At Halloween especially, and on TV shows, Wick says "we surround ourselves with death, but in real life, we want our distance from it."
In Poe's time, Wick points out, people lived much closer to death. He cites the wake as an example, where families would sit with a body in their parlor for three days to make sure they didn't accidentally bury a live person. Death was more a part of life, he explains, but now, he says, we remove ourselves from all but the concept of it.
The Gallery of Mortality won't let you remove yourself. Wick brings the experience of death close without any of the gimmickry of a haunted house. He describes his work as a three-dimensional page from one of Poe's stories. Each vignette – there are no live actors in the Gallery — shows a different aspect of death as Poe explored it in his writing. Much like reading Poe, while you're in the Gallery, the work, not the concept, will consume you; only after you get home and tuck yourself into bed will the sense of your own mortality start to intertwine with the things you saw.
Walk through The Gallery, which costs $9, at your own pace any night between now and Oct. 25, when it moves to the Studio @620 and adds live performances (you'll need reservations for that one, which costs $15). Click here for updates.