Sensory overload Memory and Synesthesia at Hera Gallery BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Artists have a hell of a job, whether they are abstract expressionists intuitively taming accidents on wild canvases, or conceptual artists calmly giving reality a half twist and shoving it toward us. Even an attentive Sunday painter faces the same pitiless question: How can you make subjective experience objective?

With Multisensory: Visual Responses to Memory and Synesthesia, Hera Gallery is exploring one realm of answers. Works in various media by 31 artists across the country were chosen, from paintings to videos. They are works that incorporate "information received from more than one sense," as a gallery statement put it.

Such an attempt can readily be accomplished in a literal way, of course. One of the most visceral art works I’ve experienced was "The Beanery," an environment by Ed Kienholtz that had us tightly file through a loud, tacky (literally) dream version of his favorite LA eatery. Varnished surfaces — sticky to the touch — and a raucous soundtrack amplified the sensory overload.

Nothing in the Hera presentation is so blatant. The submissions were juried by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, head curator at the DeCordova Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and subtlety of intent is the norm.

This is one of those art shows that is worthwhile to see for many of its included works, although you might not find it successful overall. The very concept of Multisensory: Visual Responses to Memory and Synesthesia never really falls into focus for us. For one thing, memory is such a broad, loosey-goosey rubric that most art which doesn’t admit to being decorative could be said to come from there.

As for synesthesia, there are no synesthete artists in the show. (Synesthesia is a neurological condition whereby one sense is connected to another so that, for example, artist David Levine hears colored music.) Some submitted work but none made the cut, so the unchanged title became inaccurate. So these responses on display are not to synesthesia, though some are like synesthesia, in that artists, even poets, draw from multiple sensations.

One piece does play with simulating synesthesia. William Leete’s print "Grid Pizzicato" accomplishes the visual equivalent of plucking a stringed instrument: a grid of small triangles, per definition sharply pointed, are awash with muted colors. Another work here that also attempts to yoke together disparate sensory elements is the drawing "Mouths Are Eyes," by Carla Tomlinson. A swarm of what indeed do look like heavy-lidded eyes from a distance resolve into slightly open mouths upon approach.

Perhaps the strongest synthesis art can make from sensations is empathy, when we are pulled out of ourselves and into the artist’s felt response. With "His and Hers," Jeffrey Scanlan makes us gasp when we get it. He has a 20-foot hose that Ys into two gas masks. At the other end is a coupling that could fit snugly over an exhaust pipe. My eyebrows jerked up at the title’s chilly whimsy, which would certainly be appreciated by purchasers in a post-apocalypse Kmart.

Similarly, tactility is expressly invoked in "A Mon Seul Desir/To Touch," a digital "collage" by Denis Sargent, in which tiny romantic or erotic figures are reproduced in contiguous sections, like a wallpaper design; the iteration quietly echoes the compulsiveness of desire. But profounder depths are plumbed with "Willow Woman," a digital collage by Karen Norton. Letter excerpts combine with an 1895 sepia print of a young Indian woman stripped to the waist for the medical photograph, the beauty of her face contrasting with the diseased, peeling skin of her torso and arms. The skull beneath the skin, indeed. Empathy is created most directly with the large color pencil drawing by Cynthia Heinz, "Bathing in the Juice of Creativity Revealing the Ripening Belly of Eroticism," where flesh, discarded blue jeans, and crushed berries all but make your skin tingle with the subject.

As early filmmakers did with montage and cubists did with fragmented imagery and collage, subsequent artists have shattered and combined images to convey how discontinuous our mental and visual life unavoidably is. So that technique in the context of this show may prompt ho-hum rather than oh-yes responses. My favorite of the examples here, Martin Brief’s untitled photographic composite, might come across even more impressively if it wasn’t here to exemplify a point. It’s composed of six panels that look crumpled and folded — not the photographs themselves, just the distressed imagery. They assemble into a picture of a man gesticulating animatedly, hands at head level. Upset? Angry? As with recollections of such moments, the information is ambiguous.

In a similar way, while the photograph "God Forbid There Should Be a Storm" might otherwise be harmless enough, it looks trivial when made to make more of a point than sardonic humor. Stefanie Klavens’s color image simply places us in front of a packed upright freezer. (To be fair, her "Garbage Can" is a clever companion piece, as fast food from a mural appears to be falling into the trash.)

There are other works here that will give you as much to think about. If this show paints its title message with too broad a brush, that may be unavoidable. Sometimes a gallery, like an individual artist, can take on too much. Thank goodness for that exuberance. Better too much art than too little.