Sunday, October 18, 1992
HELEN A. HARRISON
Making and interpreting maps are far more subtle and subjective than one might think, because maps appear to present objective data. But as Jonathan Swift observed, speculation has often filled the gaps left by incomplete information and faulty reckoning.
This impulse is the point of departure for “Site Seeing,” the exhibition at the Islip Art Museum in East Islip. The show features the work of 12 artists who use maps as raw material.
Organized by the museum curator, Karen Shaw, whose own art work is often based on similar concerns, the show aims, in her words, “to communicate a sense of place, the relationship of here to there, as well as a sense of wonder, anxiety and imagination.”
Burt Hansen, a World War II pilot and aerial photographer, paints the earth as a target for bombardment. His missiles attack their objectives like bizarre snakes or birds of prey homing in for the kill. If the works sound gruesome, they are anything but. Despite their grim subject matter, Mr. Hasen’s canvases are sensuous and almost playful, as if toying with the notion of war as a game. Death and destruction are entirely absent; what remains is a combination of strategy and fantasy.
Perry Steindel reinterprets city street plans as he wishes them to be seen. Based on actual maps, his delicate weblike drawings define imaginary locales, for example “Where the National Anthem Contains a Stanza on Flossing.” Thus a few ink lines suggest the political hub of a country that cares about its citizens’ dental health, presumably indicating a commitment to humanitarian values.
An even more reductive and allusive approach is seen in Lenore Mallen’s “Flight of KAL 007,” a pair of pastel drawings based on the disputed route of the Korean Airlines plane shot down for supposedly entering Soviet air space. A friend of the artist was among those killed, and the tragedy prompted Ms. Malen to investigate discrepancies in the plane’s flight path. Her images use fuzzy deliberately imprecise radar maps as metaphors for the politically motivated distortions that surrounded the incident. Unfortunately, in contrast to the strong and telling point that they seek to make, the images themselves are rather insipid.
The continuing and growing conflict between humankind and the rest of nature is a longstanding subject for Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, a husband-and-wife team represented by segments of their “Lagoon cycle,” a 12-year project that included performances and publications. The Harrisons’ work is part documentation, part meditation and part warning. As presented here, their message is too abbreviated to have its full impact.
There is, however, an effective shift from the general to the specific — from the action of volcanoes along vast stretches of coastline to the impact of mechanization on a single water hole in Sri Lanka — that focuses attention on the interrelatedness of natural- and human-generated phenomena.
Lelia Daw’s montage technique combines satellite photographs and other high-tech mapping devices in fractured landscapes that look like disaster sites. Like Mr. Hasen, Ms. Daw leaves out the wrecked buildings and the corpses, but her scenes are no less cataclysmic for the lack of identifiable victims. The casualty is the land itself, which, as one title insists, “Doesn’t Stand a Chance” against the damming and the draining. The elegant refinement of her images belies the harshness of her indictment.
Julienne Saslaw’s paintings are displayed on the floor so that viewers can stand over them and look down, as if from a high-flying plane. without being literal, she offers canyons and valleys as painterly interpretations of natural forms offset by undulating hills and slopes. Those attractive homages to the earth’s inherent beauty are appropriately tinged with mystery.
There is also a mysterious quality in Michael Gordon’s schematic cityscapes, which emphasize the planes and masses of the urban environment. His small paintings are grouped on a wall like variations on a theme, and indeed they span a 15-year period. They run the gamut from concrete to cryptic, and from distant to microscopic.
The sea gives up its dead in an untitled painting by Guillermo Kuitca, who pictures them floating in the treacherous waters of the Gulf of Bothnia off the coast of Finland. This surreal apparition encapsulates the fear and awe inspired by the uncharted sea as it encroaches on the stability of the carefully mapped land. In his smaller works, Mr. Kuitca suggests that even the safety and protection of houses are an illusion, for their rooms can be claustrophobic prisons for the spirit.
The map is an agent of movement control in Robert Bordo’s gridded panels, in which vehicles are guided and manipulated by the structures that enclose them. Planes and cars are held in check by the rigors of navigation, which force them to stay on course or risk being lost or destroyed.
Personal geography is the subject of works by Hester Simpson and Roger Welch. Ms. Simpson’s “Landmark” is a kind of interior atlas, its huge pages hung out to dry after having been torn and reshaped by experience and circumstance. Instead of specific maps or charts, the artist offers a composite of events that appear at once traumatic and affirmative.
Mr. Welch’s piece is one of a series derived from interviews with elderly people who were asked to describe their hometown. Using their recollections, Mr. Welch constructed town models, which he calls “memory maps.” The one on view is of Rome, N.Y., in the 1880s, as remembered by Winifred Wakerly, who was 94 years old when Mr. Welch interviewed her in 1973. Excerpts from the dialogue accompany the map, and together they vividly illustrate the human dimension of geography, as well as the continuum between past and present.
The exhibition will remain on view through Nov.22. The museum, at 50 Irish Lane, is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. and Sundays from 2 to 4:30. It will be closed on Nov. 11.