Jacob Exhibition at Radcliffe Institute through Jan. 14

Calm. Smoke rises vertically., an exhibition of work by Prospectus artist Wendy Jacob, is on view through January 14, 2017 at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA. Gallery hours are noon–5 p.m., Monday–Saturday.

Working with vibrating walls, a live-streaming weather report, and architectural models from schools for the blind, Calm. Smoke rises vertically. explores sensory experience through different modes of perception. Jacob challenges the viewer to place touch on an equal footing with sight. The title comes from the Beaufort Wind Scale, which relates wind speed to observed conditions at sea or on land.

The exhibition includes scale models of the Parthenon, the Tower of Babel, and a Cape Cod house. The models, built between 1935 and 1938 as part of a Works Progress Administration project to create “clear and accurate conceptions of many objects,” originally provided blind students with tactile tools for learning. The walls of the gallery itself vibrate with meteorological information that visitors can hear by pressing their ears to the wall.

By transposing disparate scales of sensory experiences intended for radically different audiences and sites—the school for the blind, the high seas—to the space of the gallery, Jacob’s work alerts visitors to simultaneous worlds of perception.

This exhibition was created in collaboration with Ohio State School for the Blind
Perkins School for the Blind.

Wendy Jacob is an artist whose work—which includes sculpture, installation, and design—explores relationships between the physical world and perceptual experience. She has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and was the 2004–2005 Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute. Her project for the Artists’ Prospectus for the Nation can be viewed here.