Tuesday Schumacher-Jones

Matthew Cusick

These beautiful maps of roadways that “go nowhere”, weaving and curving around the world. “Maps provided so much potential, so many layers. I put away my brushes and decided to see where the maps would take me. I think collage is a medium perfectly suited to the complexities of our time. It speaks to a society that is over-saturated with disparate visual information. It attempts to put order to the clutter and to make something permanent from the waste of the temporary. A collage is also a time capsule; it preserves the ephemera of the past. It reconstitutes things that have been discarded. A collage must rely on a kind of alchemy; it must combine ordinary elements into something extraordinary.”

R. Luke Dubois

Touching and, at times, hilarious, these keyword maps by R. Luke Dubois associate each town with the terms most often used by locals to describe themselves and their desired partners on their online dating profiles. Dubois joined 21 dating websites and analyzed the language used in 21 million profiles to come up with the data, which was then displayed on maps. Chicagoans say things like “prankster”, “pizza”, “smoker” and “synagogue” while Central Texans are all about “churches”, “boundaries”, “barbecue” and “Madonna” – the latter presumably referring to the Virgin, not the pop star.

Nikki Rosato

Delicately interwoven like veins, the tiny green, blue and red strips of maps used to create these incredible sculptures are molded around a packing tape form to create a three-dimensional shape. Artist Nikki Rosato removes the land masses, leaving nothing but the roads and rivers behind, reinforcing the paper with wire as necessary.

“Through the removal of the land masses, the places almost become ambiguous since all of the text is lost. Unless someone really knows the roads and highways, it is almost impossible to identify the place.”

Guillermo Kuitca

Guillermo Kuitca looks upon maps as metaphors for human relationships. He routinely uses maps of individual and communal spaces as starting points for his paintings. Over the years, Kuitca’s has incorporated maps of all kinds into his work including floor plans for houses, stadiums, apartments, and prisons; seating arrangements of theaters; street plans of cities; and even family trees or genealogical charts into his work. While Kuitca’s paintings have an abstract appearance, they always have a psychological, political, or social reference.

In his series of paintings titled “People on Fire,” Kuitca brings together a community of faceless names together as one might do in a genealogical chart. These are anonymous individuals with no personal significance to Kuitca or to the viewer. We read the names as we might headstones in a cemetery. Names are color-coded by gender: male-orange, female-pink. Some spots are left blank which Kuitca sees as symbolic of the people unknown yet connected to the whole. These blanks may evoke no special feeling in the casual viewer. Yet to anyone aware of modern Argentine history, the missing names stand for the Desparecidos, the thousands of the artist’s countrymen and women who “disappeared” during the reign of terror brought by the military junta that ruled Argentina in the 1970s.

Maps...my latest obsession

Moss Traces 1988-2011(2011)

(Own Work)

Moss, paper, frame, plastic

Dimensions 350mmx300mm

‘For many living plants it is light which dictates the path they grow. For us, it is life itself which shapes our routes and how well we thrive.’

Traces 1988-2011(2011), were a set of four frames shown for a ‘First Thursday’ group exhibition at the Vyner Street gallery in Shoreditch, London. These outlines of road maps are drawn with intentional ambiguity and spread across the paper like roots or veins. The 26 tiny moss patches represent the 24 houses and 2 hotels that have been occupied in one lifetime to date and are living landmarks, plotting a growing journey which began from birth in 1988.

All four frames were interspersed through the other artist’s work, some in lower spaces, another tucked into a top corner of the room. This is all to mirror the seemingly random path which has been taken and the opportunistic nature in which moss grows. It has not been random, but a very specific series of environmental factors which have shaped this course.