The lock at St. Anthony Falls doesn't send boats up and down the Mississippi River anymore. Now it hosts art.
On Friday and Saturday nights, St. Paul artist Aaron Dysart will project a rock-concert-like light show inside the lock's empty tank. Huge colored floodlights will be arranged on the walkways surrounding the lock. The intensity of the lights will shift according to data from logbooks kept by the Army Corps of Engineers during the years the lock was in operation — specifically, when it was filled with river water, or emptied.
"Each half-second of the show is a day in the life of the lock," said Dysart. "The saturation of those lights will change based on the pool height. They'll go from a cool blue to kind of a warm purple."
Along with Andrea Carlson, Dysart is presenting artwork inside the lock, which was closed two years ago in an attempt to halt the spread of Asian carp. A massive cement structure that's equivalent to a 50-story building laid on its side, it operated as something of an elevator for vessels on the Mississippi River.
Dysart's project, called "Surface," can be viewed from the walls of the lock, which will be open to the public.
The lights will be pretty consistent until the very end of the piece, he said. "As they start to flicker and go out, it will reflect the end of an era of navigation through that place."
Dysart spent a lot of time looking through the handwritten logbooks kept by lockmasters over the past half-century.
"The lock is this really gigantic imposing structure, but what you get to see in the logbooks is the really personal history of people who tended it, from cleaning the break room to a jumper on the bridge," he said.