There is no lack of phantoms in the back of a U-Haul truck. These un-charming vehicles are the dancing partner of every American undergoing a major transition — we who appear to be Earth’s high wire artists of personal mobility. Few forces are strong enough to hold an upstanding American back from the next lurch into the unknown; it is rare to find any citizen of our wide sweeping land unwilling to relocate due to the pull of creed, religion, family, relation, friend or attachment to some locality.

For much of human history, this attachment was everything. The Romans referred to a spirit or genius of place, which held people there even when conditions were objectively better elsewhere. In the wide sweep of history, few human beings roamed much more than 50 miles from the spot where they were born. More often than not, this provincialism generated forms of inventiveness and efficiency, referred to affectionately as “the vernacular” when we speak about the built environment.

As with so many things, and often delightfully, the post-World War II American idiom turns this tradition on its head: the one thing held in common, the one thing that carries through, might be the moving truck – that unsightly, anonymous, gas-guzzling clone which is midwife to every would-be American transformation. America, where transformation inevitably means driving.

An outstanding recent sculpture exhibit at the Maine College of Art and Design embraces, then transforms, this inverted idiom. The “Cluster Truck” group show was organized for advanced sculpture majors by their instructor Josh Reiman, and was visible for just three hours in a parking lot on Cumberland Avenue. There, visitors explored a caravan of identical U-Haul trucks, with rear ends pointed inwards like fat spokes off of an invisible, slightly bent, magic wheel.

Return the next morning, and you would find just an empty parking lot again, with no sign that art had been there at all — much the same way future historians may someday refer to the entire American enterprise, come to think of it. When artists and parking lot profiteers form a fruitful union in the name of creativity, we have graduated beyond irony into a realm of more perfect and organic collusion.

The iconic U-Haul truck bed is now so thoroughly entwined with the American myth and character that one might suggest it should be approached with caution. It is loaded. How many ghosts ride along with us in the back of a U-Haul truck? Over how many disappointments, over how many triumphs, has its bland belly presided? How many new lives has it brought forth as if out of some sexless womb? Nudge it, scratch at it, tug lightly on the rear hatch door and you will see pour forth heartbreak, reinvention, uncertainty, graduation, foreclosure, marriage, separation, defeat, refusal, escape, banishment, promotion, death and ascension.

To this impressive inventory of deeply American experiences we may now add the art epiphany.

The “Cluster Truck” sculpture exhibition invited 11 students at the Maine College of Art and Design to adopt a truck and, within its hollow cavity, bring forth an experience or spectacle. Visitors were invited to explore while hosting artists offered guidance. Some of the truck beds were designed for very specific purposes and visitors received careful instructions, while others were left completely open to private interpretation.

For example, some visitors were encouraged to climb inside the body of a truck, put on costumes and perform a spontaneous skit in the open air, or take their picture with a celebrity cutout. In other cases, all one could do was stare at the strange and interesting events that were entirely off-limits. One truck functioned as a movie theater (ideal scale!), and another as a miniature, miniature golf course.

The resulting impression of the installation as a whole points to the circus, theater, amusement park, funhouse, freak show and caravan. We embrace and look forward to the surprises, alongside moments of chaos or confusion. Behind these kinds of illusion, whether found in a parking lot or at the Metropolitan Opera, lies an enormous amount of labor and craftsmanship. Reiman pointed out that this exhibition format promoted “a work ethic and a sense of empowerment” by inviting students to “use skills such as planning, building with carpentry and metalworking techniques, and executing within a time frame.”

Two examples exemplified the breadth and ambition of this public art exhibit. Wills Phillips adds to an already impressive body of work with a photographic installation that filled the truck interior completely. Phillips used high-resolution self portraits shot methodically from multiple points of view to create the illusion that one was stepping into a body by stepping into the back of the truck. The result was disarming and dizzying. Once inside, there was no direction in which to look that did not put the visitor in direct, intimate contact with an unclothed, crouching body — which was Phillips’. Brilliantly, even the floor of the truck was a photographic image of the same crouching pose, shot as though from underneath, and cramped into the rectangular shape of the interior surface.

The scale of the body was the scale of the truck — much larger than life-size, while the face was never visible. I can think of no conventional gallery space that could have possibly conveyed the same intensity and claustrophobic immediacy provided by the truck, so deftly exploited by Phillips. With keen intuition and a streamlined, straightforward visual strategy, Phillips converted constraints into an enormously productive opportunity. For the viewer, crawling inside this body/cavity felt initially a bit strange, but then clarified and expanded as the panels knitted together into a kind of sculptural whole. Phillips noted that these images were intended to be “completely open to everything around them, very deeply in a context that is not within control.” Like Alice in Wonderland, the visitor upon crawling out is never quite the same.

A similarly transcendent effect was produced by McKenna Bommarito’s installation, in which a seated human figure presided over a foil-lined, fully reflective space, somehow undulating with the breeze. Like Phillips’ contribution, Bommarito uses every available surface to amplify visual impacts, leaving the visitor in a dreamy, half-mesmerized state of mind. Light, sound, space and bodies behaved unexpectedly…levitating, pulsing, dematerializing. No explanations provided — as it must be.

In relation to the art-making process, Phillips noted that often “the idea just strikes me, and I try to figure out why, or what it means, afterward.” Well said! For the audience, too, the strongest and most lasting public art experiences seem to work in a similar way. Willy-nilly, we throw our lives in the back of a U-Haul truck and start moving; where we are going — and why — are problems for a different day.

Jon Calame teaches art history at the Maine College of Art and Design and the University of Southern Maine.

This column is supported by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.