By Kevin Lee Associate Editor

The challenge is to see what you can’t, to go where you’re unable and to open a new world of boundless limitation.

In another bold step forward, Space 301 brings a visionary show to bear with this winter’s “Registering the Invisible,” an exhibit highlighting aspects of vision and perception that pass unnoticed. The inspiration for the show arrived via a confluence of events.

Initially, Space 301 curator Clayton Colvin engaged over 500 students at a variety of Mobile-area educational facilities, from elementary schools to high schools to a college.

“I took these GPS (Global Positioning System) devices and wiped the memories off them and then gave one to each of the students,” Colvin explained. “So the device, then, would make ‘a mark’ every two minutes trying to figure out where it was. The students held these and walked around and later we connected the marks to get a line or a shape.”

What was left were aerial tracings of the students’ wanderings, forms within forms, designs and outlines and whatever they could imagine and coordinate. The eventual product was superimposed on sections from Google Earth, a mapping system tying together satellite photos of the entire planet in an interactive three-dimensional atlas.

In addition, the work of Richard Curtis, a Florence, Ala. artist exploring “what part sounds play in constructing an individual’s sense of place,” came to Colvin’s attention.

“Richard was down here doing some work with those ‘whispering arches’ at the Battle House and with the burial of a Confederate soldier, too,” Colvin said. “I talked with him about this project he was doing with these blind people and it caught my imagination.”

Curtis had queried the couple about the role of sound in their lives. He was fascinated by their navigational techniques on the walks they shared and also by the computer tools available for the blind. The artist followed his muse.

Curtis described it as such: “I asked Charles and Leanne to participate in a series of exercises. One was to listen to different songs and draw reactionary marks on a piece of paper. I am interested in how people (blind or not) can interpret one kind of stimulus into another kind of response (for instance, sound into physical gesture). Both Charles and Leanne had never tried to draw before. Perhaps because of this, their gestural marks seemed to capture much of their personality.”

In this exhibition entitled “Sight Unseen,” Curtis includes two general displays. In one, he took his conversations with the couple and translated them into Braille but not as standard text. Viewers will be forced to engage this physically with their imaginations filling in the content.

For the second portion, Curtis texturized the drawings made by the blind couple, so that viewers can both see and touch the product to gather their impressions. He hopes the merging of visual and tactile elicits questions within the viewers as to perception, sensory input and the resulting reality.

Other segments of the exhibit explore similar themes. Heather Blackwell has produced paintings based on how advertisements portray the sole act of “looking.”

Ashley Oates and Joy Garnet use visualization via mediums we classify as “artificial,” those generated by night-vision goggles and x-rays which merely bring within our reach differing perspective.

Brian Evans has utilized data based on the brain’s capacity for sensation and storage. Colvin said his images are “often built as sound and his sound as visual data.”The artist crosses binary programs and asks viewers to “see with your ears. Hear with your eyes.”

Another haunting display employs blind artist Thomas Grillo and a Theremin, an instrument that uses an essentially invisible force, electromagnetic waves, to produce an audible product.

“Registering the Invisible” runs through March 9 at Space 301 Off Centre (6 S. Joachim St.), next to the Saenger Theatre.

While all of the work in the show isn’t necessarily the most startling or earth-shattering on its surface, the reflective nature of the theme and the curator’s purpose in the compilation serves viewers well. There are attempts at bigger things beneath the surface.

Colvin hints at future exhibitions in the fall that will further question and challenge sensory aspects of art, mentioning the possibility of traveling not only olfactory avenues but also delving into sensory deprivation.

The curator’s eagerness to stir questions and unveil inner vistas seems a validation of the trust placed in him by the CLA and a signpost to widening horizons for area arts.

Kevin Lee is Lagniappe associate editor. Contact him at klee@lagniappemobile.com.

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