There’s never before been anything like “Agency of Time: An Installation by Leighton Pierce” at the Sheldon Museum of Art.

In part, that’s because the Philip Johnson-designed temple of high modernism was built in the early 1960s before video existed, much less was an art form. So,  presenting video or film at Sheldon that isn’t projected on the big screen in the theater is a challenge.

But the museum has pulled it off physically, painting one of its first-floor galleries black and installing the screens and projectors that allow Pierce’s piece to work with perception-altering effectiveness.

Made up of thousands of digital still images compiled into minute-long segments and edited together, “Agency of Time” is constantly moving, yet meditative, creating an environment that forces the contemplation of the quick-changing imagery on three screens and a central square column.

Designed specifically for Sheldon by Pierce, an Iowa artist, the column is aimed at accentuating the flatness of the low-ceilinged, rectangular room and the three wide, but short screens positioned side-by-side on the longest wall of the room. That flatness, Pierce says in a gallery guide interview, is also reflective of the “stunning flatness of the Nebraska countryside.”

The latter is a bit of a stretch for me. Nebraska’s not flat.

 But “Agency of Time” is “about” landscape as much as it is “about” anything. There’s no narrative to be found in the looped and linked imagery. Nor does the sound in the gallery provide an anchor for the construction of any kind of mental story.

Instead, the whooshing of the wind and distant pealing of bells add to the environment Pierce has constructed, making the experience immersive rather than just visual.

Then the visuals in “Agency of Time” are stunning.

Images of trees, a flying leaf, rocks, twigs and, on occasion, a female figure are sometimes sharp and clear. But just as often, if not more so, they’re blurred and abstracted — a technique that works on perception, whether the viewer is trying to figure out what the blurred image is or allowing the videos to flow by and wash through, one set of imagery moving into the next.

That flow has a jerkiness created by the layered digital images, creating a greater sense of motion than a standardly made film or video. In fact, that motion could be unsettling to some; as could the stark contrast between the brightness of Sheldon’s Great Hall and the darkness of the room.

The looping and linking of the projections find repeated or related images simultaneously on the screen, then falling away into disparate views of nature, then coming back again. That description implies an order for the imagery, and there is definitely a well thought out pattern to what is seen. But it is far from conventional or even experimental film.

“Agency of Time” is designed to alter or at least question perception not only of the eyes but of time itself, bringing it into the realm of dream and memory, recall and reality. The world, “Agency of Time” argues, is constantly changing and a product of perception — a point made by its fast-moving imagery and contained environment.

You won’t get any of that if you aren’t willing to spend a little time with “Agency of Time.” It is only through sitting and watching or moving from place to place in the gallery to get different views that Pierce’s work makes its full connection.

The sitting leads to the meditative aspects of the work — a contemplation on the ever-shifting world presented by Pierce— and the moving about the gallery emphasizes different sets of images, whether they’re projected on the column or the screens.

In the instructive gallery note interview with interim curator Sharon Kennedy, Pierce, the director of the film and video production program at the University of Iowa, says the Sheldon installation is a preliminary version of a much larger project that will utilize up to 15 video channels and eight audio channels. That could be overwhelming and, obviously, would require a much larger space than the Sheldon gallery.

That’s one of the reasons why the Sheldon expansion into the Nebraska Press warehouse in the Haymarket is critical to the museum’s continuing ability to exhibit art of its time. The warehouse building is perfectly suited to create the large spaces needed for installations such as those planned by Pierce.

Until then, Sheldon deserves accolades for bringing complicated, electronic-driven exhibitions such as “Agency of Time” and “Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind’s Eye” to the classic building.

And those accolades aren’t for some kind of technical achievement. They are for shows that are powerful, evocative and deserve to be widely seen.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.