Mapping
Heaven
curated by Linda Griggs
November 22nd -
January 5th, 2014
Reception: Friday, December 13th, 7-9
Fri–Sun 1-6 & by
appointment
Front
Room Gallery is proud to present "Mapping Heaven" a group exhibition
of artists who use diagramming and mapping methods to explore the
unknowable.
This
show includes installation, sculpture, painting, large format video, and
collage by Babette Allina, Sally Curcio, Allen Hansen, Dennis Hlynsky,
Thomas Lyon Mills, Igor Molochevski, Lindsey Noble, Anne LaPrade Seuthe,
Patricia Smith and Larry Walczak.
The
concept for this exhibition, curated by Linda Griggs, is inspired by
"Darwin's God" by Robin Marantz Henig (March 4th, 2007, New York
Times Magazine) which discussed Stephen Jay Gould's idea of religion as a
spandrel in the evolutionary biology of the brain.
A
spandrel in architecture is the triangular space between the shoulders of two
arches and the ceiling above it. Spandrels are a byproduct of the architect's
intent to hold up a ceiling or dome with a colonnaded row.
Within
the theory of exaptation: spandrels are defined as characteristics that did not
originate by the direct action of natural selection and that were later
co-opted for a current use.
Stephen
Jay Gould appropriated this architectural term to illustrate this theory,
futher using ‘spandrels’ to describe religion as a byproduct of the
evolutionary tools of agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.
Those who cherish religious belief need not be offended. Wouldn't
"Intelligent Design" preprogram our brains to search for God.
Gould's
choice of an architectural term is poetic when viewing art that explores
mapping and the diagram as a metaphor. As Thomas Lyon Mills, artist and
educator, wrote,
"Like
mapmakers, we draw and paint what we observe, but find our drawings inevitably
cross over into the unknown, for, like maps, they are never truly, wholly
accurate, never allowing for shifting points of view, or even the necessity of
dreams. This then, is our region—where the visible and invisible meet, where
the observed and the intuitive lie side by side, and where the seen pays a
constant debt to the unseen"
There
is a visual overlap in the appearance of diagramming and mapping even though
one helps you understand something and the other helps you find someplace. But
when the thing and place are unknowable, it's hardly a meaningful distinction.
Artist Dennis Hlynsky notes that "One of the diagram’s most intriguing
aspects is how it allows us to see a mind at work, thinking things out on paper,
unconcerned about whether others will find that thinking coherent. Diagrams can
easily leap time and space, bridging unlike ideas and giving form to otherwise
impossible notions or invisible plots."
“Mapping
Heaven” presents works that give a physicality to the intangible concepts and
thoughts that are held in the nethers of our minds, where the phenomena of
creative and imaginative understanding flourishes.
Featuring:
Babette Allina works at the
juncture of science and art and has produced a vertigo inducing installation
that references celestial navigation. Originally produced for the Ladd
Observatory, "Signs of Life" is a film of the extreme tides on the
Bay of Fundy projected onto racing boat sails.
Sally Curcio’s series, “Bubble”
uses materials such as pins, beads, false eyelashes, etc. to create miniature
worlds enclosed under acrylic bubbles. During this time of economic, political
and environmental uncertainty this work offers a dream of a safe protected
environment and a nostalgia for mythical or fairytale worlds of
childhood.
For Allen Hansen being involved
with the American landscape tradition has led to using diagraming
architecturally, a different type of landscape that has as its reference only
abstract ideals.
Dennis Hlynsky is an American
artist making mesmerizing recordings of the flights, swarms and musters of
urban wildlife as a means of imagining the bedlam of shambolic behavior.
With unique permission to paint alone in the
Roman catacombs, Thomas Lyon Mills examines the elasticity of
time and the necessity of dreams: where the observed and the intuitive lie side
by side and where the seen pays a constant debt to the unseen.
Igor Molochevski's "Invisible
Beast" is an interactive performance of subversive reverence in which
vibrations created in an antique Buddhist prayer bowl are analyzed and
displayed as a visualization of "String Theory" equations.
Within her work Lindsey Nobel has
"developed a drawing language based on the otherwise invisible connections
between humans and machines, effectively manifesting the immense grid of energy
that now exists between human, machine, and spiritual consciousness. Humans
found, or perhaps even invented, that consciousness, and we are now mapping it
with our newest technologies, technologies that weave us together and make the
universe that much smaller – small enough to fit onto a painting or even a sheet
of paper.
Patricia Smith's mapping
works are the result of an elaborate process of combining layers of text with
spontaneous drawing and information transposed from city maps, in an attempt to
give shape to the space within the mind and to poke fun at its distorted
record-keeping of lived experience. Her large format painting on neoprene
rubber, Night Vision, is a more abstract vision of archetypal forms embedded
within the collective unconscious.
The feature of maps that most resonates
with LaPrade Seuthe is their capacity tomake distant things
seem close, and to represent close things as distant. In star(dust) to
star(dust)the night sky culled from google maps is the source image. And while
stars are hundredsof millions of miles away, we still are able to see some
aspect of them withour bare eyes, and even turn to their constellations as maps
to chart ourlives.
Stop Atlantic." entitled "The End."
Sascha 
Ross Racine 
survival, 
Patricia Smith’smeticulous, quietly subversive works on paper in ink and watercolor are reminiscent of architectural drawings, medical illustration, and antique maps. Her series Plot Plans for an Ideal City articulate internal thoughts and concerns, revealing an underlying hidden structure to social phenomena and psychological patterns, suggesting a depiction of both the individual mind and the broader culture. This series devolves and evolves these systems with a repetition of print making, intricate hand drawn elements and attentive color washes.
photographic series which bring a perspective of clarity to conflicts and present an empathetic vision to charged social and political issues. The boldness of their subject matter is portrayed in evoking, poetic photographs that are masterfully composed. Their recent series "Not-Self Portraits," obscures the direct compositional standards in portraiture to create empathic images, blurring the definition of their subject's features.
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