Reconciling the Map
These paintings begin with maps, toys and ornaments and investigate our relationships to place and space, the connections between the concrete world around us and the ways we imagine and represent ourselves in space and place. When I put the deer on the topographical map of Johnson, I was thinking about color and the compliments of red and green, the way flat shapes puzzle together to make an image and the visual cues we use to suggest 3D space in drawing or painting. This work plays with map vocabulary, markings and keys. Maps begin a conversation about how we conceive of space and place both in abstract visual language and in a broader cultural understanding. These paintings allow me to explore what it means to have a place on the planet.
We have language about our physical universe from deep space to subatomic string theory. I wonder how our visual language is changing to connect us to this conception of our world and if we have new visual language that bridges this gigantic stretch of conceptual space in which we live. With a local topographical map, weather maps, geographical maps, and star maps, I am thinking about my connections, social, physical and conceptual, to my place in space. Tapping at the corners of this investigation are the even larger questions about how we all understand space and place in the biggest sense.
March 2013