‘New Horizons’ at Pellas Gallery brings NFTs to Newbury Street

If you’re still lost, don’t worry. “It’s basically what I do all day long, explain to people NFTs,” joked “New Horizons” curator Alex Ness. He’s hoping the show, which opened Thursday and runs through April 23, will help to clear things up.

Ness, a 26-year-old Marblehead native and first-time curator, goes by the name NessGraphics in the NFT world, where he is also an artist. Fifteen editions of his $15,000 piece, “FL1PP3R v.01,″ a looping animation of an ever-cycling pinball machine, were available for purchase in the show. Thirteen of the 15 have already sold; the remaining two will be sold through a silent auction and a raffle. Next to most of the monitors are pairs of headphones that play music associated with the NFT — for Ness’s work, it’s an ‘80s-style techno tune.

“I wanted to highlight other commercially working artists that have been getting into NFTs,” said Ness, who prior to NFT art made concert visuals. “I said, ‘Just have a piece of art ready on this date and you’ll be in the show.’”

As the show’s producer — professional poker player David Paredes — explained it, the idea for the show came about after he walked into “every art gallery” on Newbury Street to talk to employees about NFTs. Pellas Gallery owners Alfredo Pellas and Isabel Arguello, both in their 20s, were receptive. “We ended up having a three-hour conversation about NFTs,” said Pellas. They soon devised an idea for an NFT show, and Paredes, who was a collector of Ness’s work, tapped him to recruit artists.

“My goal with producing the show was to convert traditional art collectors to viewing digital art as a valid art form,” said Paredes, 42. By showing the NFT artwork at a reputable gallery, he said, “a person who would collect a painting or a photograph, now they can see, ‘Oh, this is the same thing.’”

It’s debatable whether “New Horizons” is the first NFT art show in Boston, as it has been billed. Boston Cyberarts staged a show late last year that included “early NFT artworks,” according to its website, and the Globe reported last spring that Brookline’s Praise Shadows Art Gallery was mounting a show where the art was registered on blockchain technology. But for the Pellas Gallery, which opened in 2019, the show is an opportunity to make a statement. “We wanted to impact Boston in some way or another,” said Arguello. “We said, this is different, let’s take a risk, let’s do it.”

All of the artwork has a futuristic aesthetic edge to it. “Layer 2 Enlightenment” by Raoul Marks shows an astronaut floating in a sea of neon signs, until the backdrop transforms into a forest scene. “Root Cause Analysis” by the artist known as Gernge shows two robots performing surgery on a third. Most of the art is animation, a few are still images. “It’s an interesting dichotomy of tech and nostalgia,” Pellas said.

All the art in the show is listed on OpenSea, an NFT marketplace. But most of the show is already sold out, with some of the pieces being held for a silent auction, a raffle, or for buyers who comes into the gallery in person. “It was more of a situation of telling collectors ‘no,’ that they can’t collect a piece, because there was just so much interest,” Ness said

NFTs aren’t without their controversies: Scams aren’t unheard of, and the blockchain technology used to store NFTs carries a high carbon footprint. But they also don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. One estimate by blockchain data platform Chainalysis put the NFT market at a $41 billion valuation by the end of 2021, inching toward the $50 billion value of the traditional art and antiques market in 2020, according to Business Insider. And NFT exhibits and even full galleries devoted to NFTs are popping up around the country, from Chicago to New York City to Hollywood.

Pellas, too, believes “New Horizons,” as the name would suggest, is just the beginning. “We want to spread that knowledge, and that’s something that’s really exciting,” he said.

Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com