Suffolk University Art Gallery
School of Art and Design
Charting the World
Subjective Map Making
The Exhibition
For centuries, we have used maps to chart the world –from the body to the stars and everything in between. Both foreign and familiar, we can both lose and find ourselves. Mapping is a way of using spatial reasoning. Many contemporary artists use maps or refer to them in some way to inform their work: Google maps, imaginary maps, mind maps, genome mapping, data visualization, historical maps. The results are often reflective and personal.
Questions abound: What is the meaning of a map in 2020? How has that changed with the abundance of possibilities available by way of our devices? How do we find the way to each other and back to ourselves?
Artists
Naoe Suzuki
In her Extinction Studies series, she researches maps of the Adirondack region and trace animals’ names from the maps. On these maps, she was fascinated by finding so many places with animal names, such as “Little Otter Pond” or “Salmon River.” Floating in the sea of blackness, these names become stars in the sky, constellations, and ghosts of memories of places she holds dear. The Water Is Taught by Thirst series was created by tracing waterways from topographical maps. The waterways were laser cut, leaving behind a crackled, sculptural terrain, evoking a sense of loss.
Photo by Henri Cole
Yu-Wen Wu
Wu's subjectivity as an immigrant is central to her practice. Human migration and climate change are the defining issues of Wu’s work. At the crossroads of art, science, politics and cultural issues, her wide range of projects include large-scale drawings, site-specific video installations, community engaged practices and public art.
Heidi Whitman
Whitman's drawings are cartographies of the subconscious that refer to time and memory as uncharted territory. She is interested in states of mind, how experience is translated into thought, and how dreams jumble reality. Maps of ancient ruins and contemporary cities are part of a layered network of pathways, spirals, and switchbacks that conflates the concrete world with the invisible mind. Each Mental Map drawing is constructed with layers of hand-cut paper, ink, and gouache.
Teri Rueb
Reub's work combines sound and site using mobile media. One of the works represented in the exhibit Fens, is composed mainly from location recordings made in the Boston Back Bay Fens in different seasons, different weather, at different times of day and night. Inspired by Fredrick Law Olmsted's fascination with parks as confluences of natural and social processes, the piece takes up landscape as a site of interaction between human and non-human elements evoked through sound.
The other Core Sample, is a GPS-based interactive sound walk and corresponding sound sculpture that evokes the material and cultural histories contained in and suggested by the landscape of Spectacle Island. The piece engages the extended landscape of Boston Harbor as bound by the Institute of Contemporary Art building on the Seaport waterfront, and Spectacle Island, a former dump and reclaimed landfill park visible just off the coast.
Kate McLean
McLean works at the intersection of human-perceived smellscapes, cartography and the communication of ‘eye-invisible’ sensed data. To achieve this, she leads public smellwalks internationally and translates the resulting data using digital design, watercolor, animation, scent diffusion and sculpture into smellscape mappings. Smells form part of our knowing, but are elusive, often disappearing before they can be pinned down. Smell experience is an invisible and currently under-presented dataset with strong connections to emotions and memory.
Deb Todd Wheeler
Radio Silence is a geo-located guided audio walk at Lost Pond Sanctuary in Brookline, MA. In a time before the world began to collapse around her, with the sudden death of her son and the suicide of her brother. In the depths of grief in 2019, she set out to record a group of songs with the LENNYcollective. For the artist, it became a healing journey, a walk through the soundtrack of her life. She says “this walk is for all of us who walk the wild edge of sorrow.”
