Deconstructed Cartography

This MFA thesis exhibition, Deconstructed Cartography, explores the relationships individuals have to the places they inhabit and the ways personal narratives and experiences shape those relationships.  Places exist both as physical locations and as temporal spaces that are tied to our unique personal memories.  

I am simultaneously interested in the natural and constructed features of places – topography, waterways, roadways, and shadows – and the methods humans use to attempt to navigate or make sense of the world.

My artistic practice employs the methods and structures of mapping and cartography to investigate our human relationships with place.  Imagery originates in collected maps of real locations, photographs of cast shadows, and ink pours that integrate fragments of my physical environment here in South Florida.

These constructed compositions combine abstract and free-flowing ink pours with the regulated and precise details of dissected maps.  The work is the result of my focus on deconstructing classical modes of cartographic representation.  I emphasize the role of personal experiences, narratives, and storytelling about each locale and the centrality of those practices to the true understanding of place.

This work connects viewers to the understanding that simple, hand-drawn and hand-cut lines can be and become structures that map and embody our memories of place and time.  Real physical places are impermanent – always in a state of flux – however our memories fix those places permanently and specifically in time and space.