"house cluster" By Amy Casey. Acrylic on paper, 2007.

Only a few constants prop up the Cleveland visual arts scene. The artist-run, not-for-profit gallery SPACES has been among the most prominent and enduring of such mainstays - which is not to say everyone loves it. Over the years artists and critics have slammed SPACES' programming as trendy, unfocused, elitist, predictable or just exasperating.

All the same, SPACES' successful attempts to strengthen the artistic community and link the local scene to a wider context, embracing new forms and confronting unmarketable political and environmental issues, are among its undeniable achievements. To those who've struggled to make art and maintain a sense of self, hope and purpose in our odd, always dying and ever-reviving city, SPACES is plainly heroic. For three decades, while galleries and art organizations have flourished in brief cycles, SPACES has continued not only to show, but show up.

For the gallery's 30th anniversary this month, guest curator William Busta put together a remarkable exhibit of 11 artists, titled Living in Your Imagination. It is not, as the title might suggest, a show about creativity, at least not in any narrow sense. Rather it concerns the geography of the mind, the proportions of mountains to molehills and the fact that our subjectivity is all we know; however, it may abut realities beyond the periphery of our senses and preconceptions.

Consider Miami, Florida resident Billie Grace Lynn's small herd of three life-size Ripstop nylon white elephants, inflated by the gentle blowing of small interior fans. They stand back from the entrance to the gallery like well-interpreted clouds. Lynn has made these just the size of real African elephants, so they loom, smooth and slightly slick, gathered like curtains and devoid of specific detail. As Lynn jokes, they are "the elephants in the room," meaning all sorts of things. As the exhibit's opening statement they serve as a metaphor for the crowd of obsessions and elisions that billow in anyone's mind. They also speak of the precariousness of life in general, precious and ultimately unsustainable, a matter of surface tension.

Teetering even closer to the brink of collapse are Cleveland-based painter Amy Casey's grimly whimsical acrylic on paper fantasias. With persuasive detail and engaging, almost textile-like visual rhythms, the artist depicts the progress and aftermath of a cataclysm - the implosion of middle- American infrastructure. In pale tones bleached by bad weather and exhausted patience, Casey renders an industrial urban neighborhood torn from its roots and hanging by thin guy lines, puppet scenery clenched by an invisible fist. In one work, the clapboard colonials and duplexes are suspended above a pile of carefully painted rubble, as if they were being rescued. In another, titled "Hive Paths," road-like rumpled ocher ribbons twist in mid-air, weaving the space below a cluster of factory tanks and nuclear chimneys, supported on a ramshackle structure of planks rising from a vast pile of debris. In Casey's works functional logic has been removed, as if the city were de-boned. What follows is a profoundly creative scene of provisional formal reordering, of pure fun constantly haunted by loss.

Todd DeVriese of Lubbock, Texas also reconfigures contemporary realities as he orders the world according to economic and political forces. Some of his maps are hand-painted, reapportioned in terms of agencies, governments and monetary standards that currently hold sway. His series "New World Order" at SPACES have subtitles like "Euro," "NATO" and "Under the Flag." Several consist of maps cut up and collaged back together, kaleidoscope-fashion. Others are hand-painted in watercolor, like "Threshold III," where the continents drip down from the cartographer's flat world across a vast green arc, into the continent-like mass of a more monolithic perspective.

Over the decades many artists have plumbed the depths of SPACES' physical structure, removing sections of wall or floor, prying open the idea of exhibition space and the conventions of construction. Yet New York artist Jake Beckman does something even a little stranger as he shapes five organic-looking depressions high and low along the gallery's long west wall. Several inches across, these constructed circular intrusions are quite deep, giving the impression that SPACES' walls have the depth of thick stone or adobe. Beckman's holes seem ear-like, as if they should gather sound or suck in the surrounding atmosphere like air pockets in the sand at low tide. The point, the artist explains, is to explore the inner substance of particular locales, breathing gentle perception into the merely inanimate.

"train station" By Jiri Cernicky. Video, 2007.

In Czech artist Jir Cernicky's videos "mere" human structures are gradually replaced by dense white text, raining across the projection like code in The Matrix. In a train station, a subway platform, and outside a huge block of public housing in Prague, the artist collected (and invented) conversations and thoughts of passersby. A thick screen of daily concerns and the minutiae of human thought is draped sentence by sentence through the interior space. Gradually the original scene is supplanted by a kind of concrete poetry overlaying the brutally anonymous structures. The end result is a lattice of verbal information, the breath and tissue of a delicate species submerged in the murky waters of use and purpose.

The remaining six artists at SPACES find various ways to reorder harsh realities or the pain of hard memories, dancing into other dimensions and potencies. Vietnamese political refugee Pipo Nguyen-duy's large-scale color photographs in his "East of Eden Series" stage mysterious, perhaps redemptive dramas set in North American woodland, while Patrick Robideau creates a very dark room equipped with a realistic model of a wrecked sailing ship, on its side in the mud as if discovered after long centuries. Colette Gidar invites the imagination to travel along unfamiliar avenues in her magical photos of street scenes in Cuba, often focused on government-sanctioned graffiti and the light-footedness of human presence. Karen Yasinsky's three video animations are loops of multiple, nearly identical drawings showing lovers in the act of embracing or approaching one another. They change very little over the course of a three- or four-minute span (in one a thumb moves back and forth), vibrating with the possibilities of intimacy and the gravity of love that can change time so crucially.

Former Clevelander Kevin Everson (whose work is included in the Whitney Biennial Exhibit currently on view in New York) shows perhaps the simplest and funniest of the several videos on view at SPACES: "North" features a warmly dressed man trying to unfold a large map in a high wind, somewhere near the sea. And Claudia Eslinger, in collaboration with composer Brian Harnetty, gives audiences the most to work with. Her "The Synergy Project" consists of three screens onto each of which visitors can mix and match a panel of 45 picture and sound sequences, clicking along a mouse pad. Images range from the nearly abstract to the phantasmagoric - a DIY dream kit.

Robideau says that the collective memory he wishes to invoke includes "who we wish we might have been, who we think we are, and who we hope to be." That's not a bad summing up of the tenor of this show and of SPACES over the years, expressing the tenuous footing of art as it tries to find paths through the inconceivable territories of the future mind.

Living in Your Imagination: Through July 6 at [url=http://www.spacesgallery.org]Spaces Gallery[/url], 2220 Superior Viaduct, 216.621.2314.