LandEscape Art Review, Special Edition

Amy Schissel

Increasingly as we go about our 21st Century lives, we try to bridge the gap between spaces we see and navigate in both the physical and online worlds. Given augmented reality, every physical, geographical space is ‘interpenetrated’ with information, so all physical spaces are now also informational spaces. My paintings meld notational systems of traditional cartography and internet mapping to explore new dimensions of our contemporary landscape. I examine specifically how physical ‘location’, set against the ability to be everywhere at once via net-space, presents contradictions of identity in geo-political relationships: interpretations of personal and collective history are reshaped by the onset of digital information technology, offsetting our traditional sense of civic legibility. While addressing the progressively dematerialized quality of our data driven culture, the conflation of traditional and cyber mapping systems seeks out new social cartographies and presents fantastical meta-narratives of worlds colliding in large scale paintings and installations. Inevitably a hybrid visual language emphasizing junctures where physical, ‘factual’ cartography melds with effervescent, ‘informational’ traffic is embodied within the time-honored strategies of painting.In my recent work, the painting and drawing process acts to record physical and imaginary journeys of the contemporary body through the simultaneous spaces of the physical and cyber, marking out ‘new world’ terrain. Here, historical ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’ in traditional cartography meets the ever fluctuating, boundary-dissolving, architectures of cyberspace from the viewpoint of a female navigator, plotting, measuring, and tracking. I seek to pin-point myself within rapidly shifting spatial relationships through a labor intensive and process-oriented practice; a daily recording of repetitive mark-making becomes embodied and cerebral, drawing out expeditions in a never-ending Atlas. Layered cartographies, circular charts for tracking, grids for sizing, tablets for counting, a been-there graphite smudge on a flat-land surface, and an instruction manual for how to build simultaneous worlds encapsulating the contemporary experience of being here, there, and everywhere, reflect an ever-shifting identity as a physical, female being in an ultra-dynamic hyper-world.