Wendy Jacob: Calm. Smoke rises vertically.
Working with vibrating walls, a livestreaming weather report, and architectural models from schools for the blind, this exhibition explores sensory experience through differing modes of perception. The artist Wendy 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 a wall.
This exhibition was created in collaboration with the Ohio State School for the Blind and the Perkins School for the Blind.
Wendy Jacob is an artist whose work includes sculpture, installation, and design, and explores relationships between the physical world and perceptual experience. She has exhibited internationally at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Whitney Biennial, Galerie Emmanuel Perotin (Paris), MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, Chicago Project Room, and the Kunsthaus Graz, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a Fulbright Fellowship at the Glasgow School of Art, and she was the Mary I. Bunting Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute in 2004–2005.
Curated by Yukio Lippit, Johnson-Kulukundis Family Director of the Arts, Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Produced by Meg Rotzel, arts program manager
Exhibition design by Joe Zane, gallery coordinator
