This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on August 27, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
Review: The Bechtler’s ‘Collection, Reframed’ offers inventive soundscapes and augmented reality to reimagine modern art beyond the purely visual, though results vary in impact
“Hidden Within” is a four-channel video installation with spatialized sound and water vibration encoders. The piece was created by artist Janet Biggs, mathematicians Agnieszka Międlar and Paul Cazeaux, physicist Daniel Tapia Takaki and spatial sound engineer Tanner Upthegrove. (Photo courtesy of Bechtler Museum of Modern Art)
by Lawrence Toppman
I wonder whether the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art intended the double meaning of the title of “Collection, Reframed: We Are Here, Beyond Vision.”
In one sense, it describes an ambitious attempt to give vision-impaired museum-goers a way to experience art and the building that contains it. In another sense, it’s a proclamation by those potential audiences: “We are here, beyond your vision of what we might enjoy and what a museum ought to do.”
The Bechtler went down this road in another way in the 2010s, creating a Low to No Vision program I wrote about for The Charlotte Observer. Attendees donned the latex gloves curators use for a hands-on experience, running fingers over tapestries and sculptures. As they touched these surfaces, museum staff explained what they were feeling and what the artist intended them to perceive.
Alberto Giacometti’s small “Seated Woman” figured in that experience, and its inclusion in “Collection, Reframed” illustrates the difference between the two approaches. Now it sits untouchably inside a clear box; what was once a tactile understanding of a masterwork is now purely visual.
“Reframed,” which runs through Sept. 22, has been constructed roughly in a “U” shape. Go to the right as you enter, and you come upon a tapestry by Picasso, a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and a painting by Maja Godlewska. According to the wall text, these works were scanned using a process called Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), which employs lasers to measure distances and produce three-dimensional representations of objects. Sound designers then use synthesizers and ambisonics to create auditory representations of those objects.
The soundscape for Hepworth’s twisty piece worked for me: Noise coming from speakers might have been interpreted as the clacking shoes of a tap dancer punctuated with effortful breathing, thus echoing the sculptor’s depiction of effort and perhaps pain. The cosmic chaos “produced” by the Godlewska painting, suggestive of howling winds, also related well. But the audio for the Picasso sounded like a bad electronic soundtrack for a “B” science fiction movie of the 1950s.
For this sighted critic, the long middle gallery became simply a visit to old Bechtler friends. I didn’t get what a blind visitor would take away from this room, without being allowed to touch the thickly rugged textures of Godlewska’s “Organic Particles” or the pink-veined smoothness — broken only by a tiny navel — in Elizabeth Turk’s marble “Belly Button.” What would they make of Matisse’s leaping lithograph of a blue nude or Picasso’s linocut “Woman with Hat”? The latter represents a new type of portraiture, showing a subject simultaneously in profile and full face, but how does that come across to a blind person?
Perhaps thinking non-traditionally does help sighted people see more clearly, metaphorically speaking. I spent extra time in front of Maud Gatewood’s devastating “Absolution: Victims Becoming a Monument,” as people who died of AIDS during the 1980s slowly turned to stone in what looked like a cell, “imprisoned” by government indifference. I noticed that she rendered the walls and floor in long strokes but the dying bodies in pointillist dots, as if they were ready to fly apart. But with patient study, I might have observed that anyway.
The augmented reality experience “We are Here” in that gallery impressed me most. You listen to stanzas of a poem by Barbara Polla, holding an iPad over a succession of images from nine open books. As you examine boats on ice, a green glade and a workshop for sighted people to learn what it’s like to be blind, images float in and out of focus, blur and become ghosts.
The final leg of the “U” takes you into a room with benches and five large video screens, where “Hidden Within” reveals ways of extracting information that’s not immediately obvious. Vision-impaired dancer (and exhibit co-developer) Davian Robinson assesses the museum itself, stamping on the floor for echolocation and rapping out rhythms on steps, grates, railings and shelves. The whole building becomes a percussive instrument for him in an auditory parkour.
The other videos, a ride through Amazon River headwaters and a silent drill team from Virginia Tech — not actually silent, as feet and weapons make noise — were pleasant, if not illuminating. I especially appreciated the rifle-cam view of guns whirling, seen from above the soldiers. But “seen” is the operative word. This third room, like the second, gave me a new way of contemplating a familiar event with my 20-20 vision. What might a blind person make of it?
P.S. An embarrassing sign outside the long gallery reads, “Please be advised the next gallery contains art that shows nudity.” Have museums really come to this?
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If You’re Going
“Collection, Reframed: We are Here, Beyond Vision” runs at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 420 S. Tryon St., through Sept. 22.
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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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