The lights are out in Wyndel Hunt's Harbor Lofts apartment, which is fitting, since Hunt is wide-eyed and given to sending philosophical e-mails with shadowy meanings. This current crepuscular scene, an art installation that has taken over his living space as surely as an obsession swallows the mind, is a public recognition of a state that Hunt, pellucidly enough, calls "a personal 'eclipse.'" It goes by another name, too: Phantom Limbs Pt. 1: there, there, is its title.

The way into Phantom Limbs Pt. 1—part two opens September 16 at Crawl Space—is through the front door of Hunt's loft at 420 Second Avenue (this Saturday at 9:00 p.m. is the only remaining opportunity to see it). He stays outside; you take in a finger-sized flashlight, not to shine around the room but to locate and investigate the small artworks on the walls. The entryway is an obstacle course of hanging panels of concrete board, and beyond it is a large room with a circle of light on the farthest wall, art on the other two walls, and a table in one corner with a computer and a speaker emitting a slow-moving buzzing noise. Getting to that open room is like penetrating a high-security prison or an underground cathedral—the subject of your search, the art, is close, but still at some remove. And then, when you get right up on it with your flashlight, it's still at some remove.

The drawings are scenes in the dark: barely discernible silhouettes of buildings and romantic, windswept landscapes. Hunt made them with black Sharpie markers against a black Sharpie background, going over and over his shapes to create outlines and shadows that stand out from the void. Moving the flashlight brings out the way the shapes appear and disappear under various light conditions. They're phantom limbs: here and gone. They're also neurotic, reminding me of the secret sentences I used to encrypt at the height of an embarrassing emotion by layering letters on top of each other instead of one after another.

There are other drawings made with Scotch tape, but their reflective surfaces glint under a flashlight and don't really work. Hunt told me later they're better seen in regular light. The installation would have been better without them.

But the Sharpie drawings, the environment, and Hunt's artist's statement, which he considers a part of the work, are the basis of something fascinating. "Exhausted skepticism that statements of intent or explanations of creative process refer to actual theoretical entities or mental events has lead [sic] me to believe that for artists, these statements and explanations are themselves fictional objects," he wrote in his statement. Artworks, then, are not lost limbs whose purposes remain but lost purposes whose limbs remain.

Like artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Olafur Eliasson, Hunt's work acknowledges both hard-edged concepts and indefinable feelings, and asks visitors to do the same while they look. Hunt told me later that he finds all this art-world seriousness funny, and that part two will "draw out more of the humor." I can't imagine it. But I'll be there.

jgraves@thestranger.com