We’re raised to identify objects and process them in a practical fashion. If we’re crossing a street and a car approaches, we’re programmed to tread cautiously. If a pan sizzles, we don’t grab it with both hands. We’re so focused on life’s prickly realities that we rarely spare a thought for what isn’t there and what could be.

“I like to challenge assumptions about visual and physical reality so you imagine what’s not there,” says Los Angeles-based artist Eames Demetrios, who’s created a whole “what if?” world called Kcymaerxthaere with its own language, geography, culture, and physics. He travels the globe giving talks and supervising projects that link his world to ours, mounting markers denoting “historical events,” initiating community art and writing, building installations, and developing his strange saga through stories and web pages.

The vocabulary can be daunting — Kcymaerxthaere (pronounced “Chimerascthere”) is the name of his universe, a dauktryn is a doctrine, a Svenskcy is a district, and a dgyld is a young person. But with Demetrios acting as a rapid-chatting, amiable guide and geographer-at-large, the elseworld soon makes sense.

Daunted by the title? You should be. Kcymaerxthaere is an incredibly imaginative, genre-bending project by Eames Demetrios, grandson of feted design duo Charles and Ray Eames. It’s an ever-growing alternate universe linked to ours by plaques and artifacts.

Bring your imagination. Everything about Kcymaerxthaere aims to get viewers thinking outside the box. “In art there are many self made worlds, with people creating their own universe,” says Halsey Director Mark Sloan. “This guy literally created a separate world.”

Look for local links. The Halsey is exhibiting an overview of Demetrios’ creation, and his art will be installed at the Old City Jail and in Charleston Harbor. He’s being helped by the American College of the Building Arts, Charleston Waterkeeper, and students from Academic Magnet High School.

You know you’re dating yourself if you can remember the days when you could deposit a handful of change into a cigarette machine, pull the thick knob of your choice, reach your hand under the cold swinging door, and wait for the thunk of a tightly packed box of smokes. These machines were clunky, heavy on top with thin legs at the bottom, and usually positioned near the pay phone in the back corner of a bowling alley. As the years progressed and smoking lost its glamorous air, these machines slowly disappeared. They were no longer cool; they were relics from our country’s unhealthy past. Until Clark Whittington came along.

A dozen years ago in the heart of tobacco country, Winston-Salem artist Whittington was struck with inspiration and installed 12 of his black-and-white photographs into a retired cigarette vending machine. He priced them at $1 each and was sure it wouldn’t last a month. The idea caught on, and now there are more than 100 of these Art-O-Mat machines across the country, including one in the Smithsonian and another at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. In a variety of bright colors, from turquoise to orange to lime green, these mini galleries are individually designed by Whittington and the “host.”

Leslie Wayne wants viewers to feel the Earth’s compression and sense the subduction of geologic forces in her dimensional oil paintings. She layers vibrant and dissonant colors built through the structural qualities of paint. When the top layer is dry, she cuts, flips and sculpts the material to evoke the power of the natural world. A collection of the last five years of her work is currently being shown at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Artin Charleston, SC. Amy Mercer recently spoke to the artist, on behalf of DailyServing.com, about her process, the physicality of her materials, and the nature of her restlessness.

If you’ve walked into Marion Square any time within the last two weeks, you may have noticed a new, strange, stick-like structure near the corner of Calhoun and King Streets. Similar to skinny Lincoln Logs, the spindly structure weaves itself into a canopy over the west corner pathway of the square. It popped up, seemingly overnight, and resembles a giant Jenga game. You’d almost not notice this piece of artwork since it blends so well with the scenery. But then evening falls, and the blue lights designed into the wooden slats shimmer a bit more brightly, easily catching the eyes of passers-by.

Photographer Pedro Lobo believes the walls of a home say more about its inhabitants than a family portrait. “Walls can tell a lot about the history of a place,” he says. “Walls speak loudly.” But if the walls of your home are made of corrugated zinc, and your neighbors can look into the room where your children sleep, and your kitchen is lit from wires that criss-cross in front of your window, what does that say about you?

A native of Brazil, Lobo studied architecture and painting before turning his attention to photography. Favelas: Architecture of Survival is a collection of 40 large-format prints that chronicle the lives of the very poor in Rio de Janeiro. “What I saw really intrigued me,” he says of his years photographing the favelas. “I saw the strength of the struggle to survive in adverse conditions.”

Driving through the city, we might notice the construction projects, the garbage trucks, the landscapers trimming the hedges, the school buses passing by. We might see the stacked shipping containers at the port or the rows of truck bays behind the warehouse.

We often may take for granted the paved roads and housing complexes, the discarded water bottles and stacks of flattened automobiles at the scrap yard or discarded cell phones, the SUVs, toy collections and individually packaged juice boxes at the grocery store.

For this is the way we live.

An ambitious new project organized by the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art aims to draw attention to the way we live — and the way other people live — and to challenge assumptions, habits and ideologies.

“Bluesphere: Earth Art Expo” kicked off with an installation called “Ice Storm” by Southern artist Carson Fox at Redux Contemporary Arts Center last month. It ends at the Gibbes Museum of Art with a photography exhibit that runs Dec. 17-March 27 called “Industrial Scars” by Charleston native J. Henry Fair.

The results of a massive four-year photography project are on display through Jan. 9, 2011, at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia. Called “Palmetto Portraits,” the exhibition features the work of 24 photographers who have created 275 color and black-and-white portraits of residents of the Palmetto State.

According to Paul Matheny, the museum’s curator of art, the portrait project began in 2006, when the Medical University of South Carolina, located in Charleston, decided to “provide inspiring images” on some of its interior walls. To launch the project, the university sought help from the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston. The idea, Matheny said, was to present the medical students and their teachers with images of the people whom they might one day serve.

Call and Response: Africa to America / The Art of Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo recently opened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition brings together the work of two American artists intrigued by the formation of cultural identity and individual experience within a society. Drawing inspiration from the rich ceremonial traditions and elaborate guises of African nations, Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo create objects that are visually captivating and conceptually charged. Cave’s imaginative Soundsuits and Galembo’s photographic portraits of West African masqueraders prompt the viewer to regard the world in terms of connection and community.

Mary Jane Jacob arrives at the airport from Chicago around noon. She’s in town for a weekend to jury the CofC School of the Art’s Young Contemporaries exhibition. She’ll grab some lunch, unpack her bag, then dig in to her task. But first she has a stop to make.