What are maps for? Of course, you think you know, and so did I until I found my way to “Mapping: Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art,” at the Katonah Museum of Art. The works in this terrific exhibition offer so many takes on the subject that you feel your personal definition of cartography exploding as you walk with no map to guide you through the galleries.
For some of the show’s 38 artists, existing maps serve as raw material to be turned into sculptures, collages and such. For others, a map is the end result, created from experience or imagination to fix a place, a time or an idea. But all these objects, gathered by the guest curator, Sarah Tanguy, force you to reckon with maps as aids to meditation, objects of pleasure, blueprints for war, records of subjugation. And oh, yes, I almost forgot: as tools for getting from here to there and back again.
Locating “here” can become tricky, however. You’ll get lost if you try to follow Karey Ellen Kessler’s fascinating maplike drawings they’ll pilot you no farther than her psyche. Kysa Johnson tracks the travel paths of subatomic particles in swirling colored lines there’s no Lonely Planet accompanying her map, either. At first glance, Lordy Rodriguez’s delineations of the North and South Poles seem nearer our traditional notions of what a map should be. But closer examination reveals that these two ink drawings literally upend our sense of the globe, reordering our perspective and providing a biting commentary on it as well.
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