Hudson (Show)Room Exhibition: City Maps

Erik Benson, Janice Caswell, Alex Lopez, and Ruth Root
02.04.04

about the exhibition and artists
If given free reign to design a map of your city, what would it look like? It might follow convention, mathematically plotting the relationships between streets and neighborhoods. But perhaps yours would represent urban space more abstractly and personally. Rather than a purely geographic map, yours might be a mental map.

The artists included in City Maps have chosen the latter strategy. Erik Benson (Brooklyn, NY), Janice Caswell (New York, NY), Alex Lopez (San Antonio, TX), and Ruth Root (New York, NY) have created colorful guides that convey their feelings about a town rather than charting the space between one quadrant and the next. These abstract works question whether the methodical graphing of space is any more useful than the depiction of what one might experience in it.

In the 1950s French theorist and artist Guy Debord began creating "psychogeographic" guides to Paris. Based not only on geographic markers but also on Debord's experiences drifting through the city, they emphasized his reactions to urban space, not just what it looked like. Four decades later postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson hinted at the social potentiality of such ordering in his essay "Cognitive Mapping."2 He proposed that in the present phase of multinational—or late—capitalism, there is a growing disconnect between "Wesen and Erscheinung, essence and appearance, structure and lived experience."3

Mental maps help navigate the disjointed cityscape by asserting the importance of subjectivity and human experience. The artists in City Maps follow in Debord's footsteps and have taken up Jameson's task.

Erik Benson's panoramic paintings teeter between abstraction and representation—simultaneously appearing fantastic and rooted in reality. Through drying acrylic paint on a glass surface, cutting strips of the hardened pigment, and applying them to the painted canvas, he constructs intricate
cityscapes that are monumental in scale. This building process mirrors his subject: the city's
architecture. Dried acrylic highways, apartments, and other structures shimmer off of beige canvas; spots of unnatural color (hot greens articulate windowpanes) add a surreal effect. Missing from these quiet, street-level views of the city are people. The dreamy depictions suggest an urban space where architecture displaces those who use it. Benson's guides focus on the way we move through parks and streets, hinting at how they exist in memories, and proposing that architecture gives life to us just as we bring life to it.

Janice Caswell's intimate guides trace human (and sometimes animal) movements, leaving out the structures and the representation entirely. On small sheets of white paper Caswell connects swarms of colored dots with drawn lines, creating delicate, bird's eye views of how urban space is traversed. A line begins at a small cluster of green and yellow points, meanders without stopping, and then loops in and out of a dense metropolis of orange and blue. Areas that receive repeat visits have a multitude of dots and a web of lines—other regions remain entirely untouched. These slight gestures poignantly evoke the idiosyncratic ways we use urban space. Some of us avoid the center in favor of familiar neighborhoods; others fan out across the whole city. These maps embody Debord's idea of psycho-geography—that people use cities in ways that defy careful structural planning. Caswell's compositions describe spaces that are, above all, inhabited.

Floating several inches from the wall, Alex Lopez's colored aluminum panels are detailed with spare slips of contrasting pinstriping. Untitled/Little Deaths (2003) is a series of abstract "snapshots" of suburban infrastructure seemingly taken from above. A thin orange line racing and circling across a field of blue signifies a freeway. A watery arc and sprinkle of tiny yellow circles cut through an inky black background suggests a moonlit river and cluster of homes. While calling attention to zones that are frequently marginalized in portrayals of the city (parking lots, roadways, rivers, streetlights) the depictions are melancholic and
contemplative. It is unclear whether suburbia is to be feared or celebrated. Lopez's works scrutinize the periphery, mapping what life looks like outside the city center.

Ruth Root applies thick strokes of enamel paint onto irregularly edged metal sheets. Purple squares, gray rectangles, and other asymmetrical shapes lock together like the jigsawed districts of many growing cities. Just as urban boundaries do not adhere to straight lines, each painting bulges here and pokes out there. Root extends the aluminum beyond the four-sided frame the eye imagines: a yellow patch stretches "south" creating a vertical composition that has the island shape of Manhattan; a rounded corner of purple swells "east" and creates a lumpy rectangle that could be Berlin. While these untitled works are firmly grounded in abstraction, they simultaneously bear a strong relationship to urban mapmaking. Rather than guides to specific places, Root's works are reminders of the segmented way we often think about, and experience, urban space.

While geographic maps are rooted in physical proximity, the works in City Maps are grounded in the psyche. Benson, Caswell, Lopez, and Root fabricate their understandings of the city by way of their emotional, temporal, and psychophysical responses to it. They create links between memory, perception and physicality—simultaneously destabilizing notions about traditional maps and offering alternatives. These maps may be personal guides to city spaces, but they are no less useful for making sense of the often bewildering contemporary landscape.

An example of that work is Discours sur les passions de l'amour (1957), which was included in Mapping, a 1994 exhibition curated by Robert Storr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY which focused on the geographic map as an artistic motif.
2Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988) 347-357.
3Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," 349.

artist biographies
Erik Benson received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2001). He has had solo exhibitions at RARE, New York, NY (2003), and at Finesilver / FYI, San Antonio, TX (2003). He has been included in group exhibitions at Angles, Santa Monica, CA (2003-04); the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2003); and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2002).

Janice Caswell received her BA in Philosophy from the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO (1985) and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (1998). She has had a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2003), and been included in group shows at Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, France (2004); Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY (2003); Schroeder Romero, Brooklyn, NY (2003); and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2002).

Alex Lopez received his MFA from Alfred University, NY (1996). He has been included in group exhibitions at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX (2003); the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2002); Blue Star Contemporary Art Space, San Antonio, TX (2002); and The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas, TX (1999). He was included in Glow: Aspects of Light in Contemporary American Art, which traveled to a number of Texas spaces in 2002-03, including Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin (2002).

Ruth Root received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (1993). Solo exhibitions include: Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY (2003, 2001, 1999); Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy (2000); and Nylon gallery, London, England (2000). She has been in group exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, WA (2003, 2002); Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, NY (2003); ACME, Los Angeles, CA (2002); and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (2000).

Exhibition Dates
February 4 – April 18, 2004

Panel Discussion and Reception
Thursday, April 1, 6:30 - 8:00 PM, panel discussion followed by reception. City Maps artists will participate in a conversation about the exhibition, and how lived experience and emotion can transform understandings of place. Discussion moderated by the exhibition's curator, Kate Green, ArtPace's Education and Curatorial Associate.

Brown Bag Lunch
Wednesday, February 25, 12:00-1:00 PM
Join ArtPace for a gallery walk-thru with the curator of City Maps and a brown bag lunch provided by Sip. Please call ArtPace to make reservations.

Event Location
All events held at ArtPace, 445 N. Main Avenue. Free parking at N. Flores and Savings Streets. ArtPace is open to the public Wednesday thru Sunday, 12-5 PM, Thursday 12-8 PM, and by appointment. There is no charge for admission.

About ArtPace
ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio serves as an advocate for contemporary art and as a catalyst for the creation of significant art projects. We seek to nurture emerging and established artists and to provide opportunities for inspiration, experimentation and education. Through our International Artist-in-Residence Program, we invite nine artists annually to participate in a two-month residency which supports the evolution of new ideas in art. Our broad range of panels, lectures, artist talks, and studio visits cultivates diverse audiences for contemporary art and provides a forum for ongoing dialogue.

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org