About the Exhibition
In Mapping Hidden Systems three artists imagine, map, and make visible the systems we participate in daily; from socio-cultural structure, to computer circuits, to interstate infrastructure. Using unique methods distinct from traditional cartography, the exhibition draws attention to mapping as understanding and communicating, what it means to collectively imagine space, and the implications of assigning scalar relationships. These works are tools we can use to chart our position; understand differently; construct something new as from a blue print or pattern; disrupt a territory; achieve greater agency.
Using a sewing template for a lucha libre mask, Victor Maldonado presents three variations on the mask in surprising scales and materials. By disrupting the function and symbology of the mask, Maldonado redirects it toward a grappling with themes of identity, gender, social spaces, labor, and colonization, and blurs the distinction between map and template.
The sculpture by Stephanie Simek, XOR, AND, NOR (or how to process all possible outcomes for a+b when a and b equals zero or one) addresses what the act of processing information looks like in its most distilled form. Her schematic sculpture of a simple computer reveals materials as their basic functions: graphite as a resistor, copper crystals as conductors, silicone as transistor. The work reveals a new relationship to ubiquitous technology, making the computer both more accessible and more strange.
Jonah Susskind’s work Tertiary Territory takes the form of an immersive suite of images of the interstate system. By overlaying aerial views with views from the road, he reveals a feedback loop between resource extraction sites and their constituent and reciprocal transportation
networks, between what is hidden and what is experienced.
networks, between what is hidden and what is experienced.
