The most recent, characteristically bold group exhibition at Corners Gallery takes inspiration from Katharine Harmon’s 2009 e-book “The Map As Artwork: Modern Artists Discover Cartography.” Out-of-print however nicely price discovering, the anthology presents work by a variety of painters, sculptors, and different visible artist working with the map as motif, metaphor, and materials.
Open by way of February 24, “Modern Mapping: We’re Nonetheless Right here” follows up on a 2016 invitational of comparable title that includes six principally native artists. (Barbara Web page, Masha Ryskin, Laurie Snyder, and Werner Solar all return.) For this 12 months’s map exhibit, owner-director Ariel Bullion Ecklund has chosen the route of the open name present. The combination of native, regional, and nationwide artists is a attribute advantage of Ecklund’s group curating.
Even earlier than any of the work, two broad instructions taken by the 28 artists right here could also be predicted. Among the artists, although surprisingly comparatively few, work with cartography in probably the most literal sense: both working with conventional printed maps or reinventing their attribute motifs by way of idiosyncratic private language. There’s additionally a glut of summary work and works on paper—a few of them, unsurprisingly, extra distinguished than others.
The abundance of abstraction raises a query: What makes it mapping? From Kandinsky and Mondrian to the current day, the hyperlink between summary portray and panorama runs deep. The tendency of abstractionists in direction of indirect somewhat than literal depiction undoubtedly opens up area for a map aesthetic. Nonetheless, once we are requested to embrace pretty conventional examples of calligraphic, geometric, and expressionist abstraction as “maps,” we could really feel that corners—excuse the pun—are being reduce.
Julie Waltz-Stalker of Corning, who just lately confirmed her work at Hector Handmade out on Seneca Lake, contributes probably the most compelling straight-ahead portray right here, working in oil on board with a richly coloured, gestural painterly method. “Push Me/Pull You” and “Perhaps This Time” are densely layered, suggesting botanical and geological varieties and processes.
Although summary, InShik Lee of Ithaca and Ellen Weider of New York Metropolis embrace a intimately scaled, clear reduce, doodle-like aesthetic that feels extra cartographic than that of different abstractionists right here. Lee, educated as architect, provides notably two notably hanging diptychs on paper. ”Map #11.21,” in black ink, incorporates densely tangled noodle-streets in two tiny circles whereas the 2 tone reduce paper “Map Pink 2.1” performs with unfavourable and constructive area.
Weider is maybe higher represented by her work, which had been the topic of a solo present at Corners final spring. Right here she exhibits two small drypoint etchings: the reductively geometric bright-purple “Parallel Universe” and the black ink “Map.” The tondo form and engagingly wobbly grid of the latter conjoins her work with Lee’s.
A number of artists take up the map theme extra actually. Barbara Web page of Trumansburg contributes a set of map-related entries from her ongoing “E book Marks” sequence of altered library checkout playing cards. As nicely, she provides “Sidetrack,” a richly coloured painted collage map incorporating stitching patterns and map pins. Native artwork photographer Laurie Snyder is joined by her teenage grandson Amos Snyder Bergen. Recalling Pop Artwork at its most genuinely witty, Laurie exhibits her “USA Map,” composed of woven 16mm movie strips. The youthful Snyder provides an “Imaginary Ski Space Map,” pen on paper, which is as meticulously detailed and playfully convoluted as one may need a fictive map to be.
A couple of artists current pictures, which may be considered, albeit crudely, because the third broad tendency right here. It appears an unlikely one. In any case, what could possibly be extra totally different from the shifty, imaginary constructs of mapping than pictures, which seems to offer us a palpable approximation of brute actuality?
Julie Nathanielsz of Ithaca and Ben Altman of Danby provide photograph sequences, collectively exploring the private and non-private significance of land. Nathanielsz provides “After Noë,” two gridded montages, recollecting what seems to be a household wilderness exploration. Altman is thought round city for his politically-driven pictures: incorporating components of set up, land artwork, and efficiency. For his newest sequence, seen tentatively right here, he makes use of his personal rural property as a canvas to discover Indigenous dispossession. ”I Personal This Unceded Land” and “I Personal This Stolen Land” satirically undercut the grand custom in panorama pictures.
It is a mildly disappointing present—no less than for these of us with a peculiar affinity for this subject material. Common viewers of native group reveals could acknowledge the problem in drawing year-after-year from the identical pool of artists from in and round Ithaca. Artists are unlikely to take up mapping as a critical inquiry merely to allow them to enter one other juried present.
Broadening the decision helps significantly—once more, that is one among Corners’ chief virtues as a gallery. And it says rather a lot as nicely that artists from Ithaca and the Finger Lakes can maintain their very own subsequent to respected names from New York Metropolis and throughout the nation.
“Modern Mapping: We’re Nonetheless Right here”
Corners Gallery
903 Hanshaw Rd # 3,
Ithaca
Tue.-Fri. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat 10 a.m-2 -p.m.
By February 24