Getting the Feel of Art : A Woodland Hills exhibition ignores the old museum rule ‘Don’t touch’ and appeals to the senses of sight and hearing too.

Virtually all the human senses are represented here in one way or another, scattered across the walls and floor of the Artspace Gallery in Woodland Hills: art that can be seen, heard or touched.

Gallery curator Scott Canty was happy about all this, of course. It had been his plan to collect a variety of artworks that largely ignored the old museum rule that tells visitors: “Don’t touch!”

“Here we want you to touch things,” Canty said last week, as artists were working in the gallery to install their art in time for the July 13 opening of “Eyes to See, Ears to Hear, & Hands to Touch.”

Canty had one regret about this new show.

“We don’t have smell,” he said. “I couldn’t find an artist that used smell.”

Still, visitors will find enough to keep themselves occupied in this exhibition, which includes the work of 11 Los Angeles-area artists. Upon entering the Artspace, for example, visitors will be confronted by artist Karen Frimkess Wolff’s long curtains made of small bells, painted in sections of red, green, yellow and blue. Each curtain offers a different pitch when touched.

“What intrigued me about her work was that there’s more than one side to it,” Canty said. “You can look at it, but you can hear it and touch it as well. In fact, you’ve got to touch it to get the whole scope of the piece.”

Other works in the show explore other sensory possibilities, including the whimsically impracticable sweaters of Naomi London, the moaning, speaking sculptures of Daniel Wheeler, and Jan Sanchez’s earth and light installations.

“The idea of working with the senses is what artists’ work is all about,” said Sanchez, taking a break from spreading various soils culled from Arizona, California and New Mexico around her glass domes and rectangles of light. “This actually heightens people’s awareness. It’s subtle, but it creeps into your life.”

Across the gallery, Maurice Gray’s altarlike sculptures combine tactile elements with haunting accents of neon light. The works of rugged metal also incorporate crucifixes and other religious symbols with animal parts found on the Texas roadside.

With one of the sculptures, titled “Strange How the Night Speaks,” Gray constructed a long rectangular structure, with small strips of yellow, green and purple neon. The words to a poem are pounded into the metal, reading down from the top, where a blindfolded cat’s head is mounted.

“They look like they’ve been uncovered, unearthed,” Canty said. “And the neon really brings it into a contemporary mode.”

And yet, Canty said, Gray would probably prefer not to be labeled a “neon artist.”

“In a commercial sense, I think the neon artists have a harder time getting exhibitions because their art might be viewed as a craft,” Canty said. “It’s just now breaking through that, with artists utilizing that media in their work.

“Artists use industrial materials in their work, so why can’t they use industrial lighting?”

David Svenson, whose large carvings in the show feature neon figures sprouting ecstatically from the wood, said he was generally unconcerned about such labels.

“People who buy and enjoy it don’t worry about those things,” he said. “And as artists we do what we enjoy, and I think that’s all we want to do.”

Artist Candice Gawne, whose works in the Artspace show mingle neon light effects with a tangle of willow branches and paper sculpture, agreed. She has used neon in her paintings and sculptures for the last 10 years. “It’s the magic of light,” she said. “It’s a symbol of life force or energy.

“These are great symbols for dreams, the color of dreams and things that go on at nighttime.”

GET WHERE & WHEN TOPPER

Location: “Eyes to See, Ears to Hear, & Hands to Touch,” Artspace Gallery, 21800 Oxnard St., Woodland Hills.

Hours: Open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Aug. 15.

Price: Free.

Call: (818) 716-2786.