We consult maps to help us explore and navigate through our world. Maps have scales, keys and symbols, collections of data which support their utility but also lend to their uncontested authority as sources of information. We trust maps to lead us home. Under the guise of that authority, a map can betray our trust and get us very lost. While I was exploring the artists book collection, I came across some artists who do just that. They use maps to trick, to confuse, and to delight.
Vancouver artist Allyson Clay trained as a painter but later adopted the mass produced forms of the video and artists books. In all these forms she manifests an interest in subverting traditional masculine domains. Stores: from “Painting with Voices” has her manipulating the masculine province of mapping to her own ends.
Stories is a chapbook that pairs Clay’s drawings of labyrinths with texts that, according to Clay, “work against the images.” The artists book, with illustrations and text created by the author, accompanied an exhibition of the artist’s paintings at the Costin Klintworth Gallery in Toronto. It contains ten different labyrinths, precise and geometric, in sparse black and white. The eye is mesmerized by the interplay of positive and negative space, as it follows paths that seem to pulsate around the page.
The facing prose to each labyrinth consists of short vignettes, micro stories that bring us intimately if briefly into the space of strangers’ lives: “her eyes following his voice as he spoke about his work, he was conscious of a rhythmical scratching sound he was making a telephone ringing a pigeon on the window ledge.” The mazes just as often depict the isolated head space of these anonymous characters as they do the rooms where they live and work; the precise angular geometries of the mazes are often in direct conflict with the text: “She poured a bag of flour over the floor making a large white circle with a diameter of three feet.” The circular image of the flour is contested rather than illustrated by the maze.
The female and male characters too seem to wander mazes, both working towards a kind of artistic creation, but within gendered spaces. The male character trudges through maze-like city streets or thinks of painting mingled with sexuality, while the female arranges the objects of housework into an installation or, skirt “swishing,” serves a meal.
The preface to the book gives us some clue as to the artist’s intentions:
The labyrinths on the following pages are based on grids of 25 and 39 units. A multicursal labyrinth is one in which there is more than one route to the goal or when the route(s) branch out, leading to dead ends or to other points along the route.
The measurements help to define these mazes as something scalar and precise, yet on the inside they are full of misdirections. The spaces in which the characters act and relate are likewise full of dead-ends and obscure goals. As readers we are trained to use illustrations as guides to the text: yet here the author plays with this idea, leading us down twists and turns, between text and image.
Discover more of Allyson Clay’s work through the library’s catalogue.
A 2005 review of Allyson Clay’s exhibit at the Leo Kamen Gallery
The second book I discovered juxtaposes sketched maps, graphs, geological survey data and oddly chosen historical details such as the limestone content of football fields) in a mock atlas of Crowsnest Pass in southwest Alberta. It was created in collaboration between historian and writer Carol Williams and visual artist Scott Rogers during a residency held by the Trap/door Artist Run Centre at the University of Lethbridge’s Gushul Studio.
Scott Rogers is a Canadian artist based out of Glasgow. He explores the spaces of video games, tron-style virtual reality, neon spangled 80s sci-fi film sets and the digital tools of engineering software. Carol Williams has an interdisciplinary background in indigenous and gender studies, as well as U.S. history. She is most interested in framing the dominant narrative of the American West around that of women and indigenous people’s hidden stories. The book combines these concerns into a very human geography of the west, where the relationship between geology, architecture, history and data is documented through both text and image.
The influence of drafting software like AutoCAD on Rogers, prominent in his installation work, is present but subdued in the organic diagrams of buildings and info-graphics. These maps and diagrams hearken rather to a pre-GIS cartography; a sense of imprecision that suits the subjective stories and memories in the text.
The sketches and maps of buildings, topography, soil content and foot paths have the aura of science, but the accompanying stories of women’s lives,“heroism,” “disasters,” and “grandmothers” make us distrust the intent of the data. A closer look at the maps reveals a lack of identifying features–there are no place names to orient us. We are wandering into unknown territory of the “Crow indian,” of single mothers, heroes, and volcanic eruptions.
Explore the work through the library catalogue.
The final book of the week takes the form of an altered Michelin map of Belgium upon which the artist has decorated with weather symbols. The laser-printed rainclouds and suns cover the entire map in an irregular pattern. This book is one of a series entitled Everybody’s Mapping Nowadays, in which everyday road maps are built upon with what Pawson calls “layers of symbols and imagery. His intent is to take instantly recognizable logos and make them unfamiliar through misuse.
The meaning of both map and symbols is obscured by the pairing of opposites (sun and rain), leaving the viewer amused and perhaps encouraged to look more closely at what is usually an everyday object. The artist’s additions only add to the density of data on this map, making it difficult to use in its traditional sense, but certainly more fun.
Every map in the series is unique (alien visitations, geodesic domes and buried treasure are just some of the additions, according to Pawson), the world within the map controlled by the artist’s creative whims: “I’ve built hundreds of museums, art galleries, bookshops,libraries and reopened closed Post Offices but there’s also surveillance cameras.” Pawson is essentially colonizing the maps; they are so changed they no longer can hope to represent their signified place.
Pawson’s maps are humorous, graphic and decorative. They encourage us to examine our assumptions about the artefacts we create to interpret our world, and ask questions about land use, the environment, and mass production. A bookbinder and ephemera hoarder who runs his own mail order art business, Pawson has an obsession with the “cool crap” he finds around him, and loves to share. The laser printer is the ideal way to get his work out there at reasonable prices, something that is important to his work on a conceptual level. Check out Mark Pawsons website for more information and to browse his distro.
Locate Mark Pawson’s work in the library.
library@ecuad.ca 
604-844-3840 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC
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