Category: Art

Recent Book Reviews

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Atlas ObscuraAt The Skiffy and Fanty Show, Paul Weimer reviews Atlas Obscura. “So is there a point to the book? Is there any good reason to read the book and not just go trolling and traversing through the website, which has many more entries? Yes. Even in an interconnected world such as ours, there is a tactile experience to flipping through this book, coffee table style […] While wandering through links on the website is a time-honored tradition, the book has a presentation that the website can’t quite match.” I reviewed Atlas Obscura last September.

You Are Here NYC: Mapping the Soul of the CityForbes contributor Tanya Mohn reviews Katherine Harmon’s latest map art book, You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City (previously). If all goes well (it doesn’t always, mind), I should have my own review of this book up later this week. [WMS]

Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City AtlasAs for the other new map book about New York City, Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, there’s a review up on Hyperallergic by Allison Meier, replete with photos of the book. “Every map is an intense act of creative collaboration, with essays and illustrations in Nonstop Metropolis from over 30 artists and writers. […] And the maps emphasize that this city’s character is often missing from our more official cartography.” [WMS]

Iwan Bala’s Controversial Brexit Exhibition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

iwan-balaRunning until 30 November at the Penarth Pier Pavilion in Penarth, Wales, Dyma Gariad (fel y moroedd)/Here is a love (deep as oceans) is an exhibition by Welsh artist Iwan Bala. It’s an angry, provocative collection of caricatures and maps about Brexit, from a strongly Remain perspective, done in a style described by the Penarth Times as “the rapid often stumbled, crossed out, corrected, blotted, re-adjusted rush to put thoughts on paper and the attempt of a poet to capture a line before it ebbs in the memory.” As the Pavilion describes the exhibition:

Responding to the result of the electorate’s vote on the UK’s EU membership, Bala began to make (alongside politicized ‘maps’), satirical caricatures of the principle [sic] players in the lead up to and result of Brexit. An Artist has a duty to comment, protest and become an agent provocateur through the medium of visual communication. Cartoons have a long and illustrious history, and have always lurked somewhere in the background environs of his artwork.

They may have been anticipating some pushback—the exhibition also had a content warning—and indeed the exhibition has gotten some angry responses sufficient that the Pavilion had to issue a statement defending their decision to host it. That alone tells me it was a success: art provokes. [WMS]

This Map Needs a Magnifying Glass

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Bangkok Post interviews artist Karoon Keamviriyasatean (aka Zillv). “To record the beauty of Rattanakosin Island, known simply as the ‘Old Town’, freelance artist Karoon Jeamviriyasatean has drawn a map. But it isn’t any normal map. It is a stunning and intricately detailed architectural birds-eye-view cityscape of Rattanakosin Island. Every block, shophouse, fort, temple and soi is depicted, and the only way to see it in full detail is through a magnifying glass.” The map is available for sale here. [WMS]

You Are Here: NYC

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

you-are-here-nycToday is the publication date for Katharine Harmon’s latest book of map art: You Are Here: NYC: Mapping the Soul of the City (Princeton Architectural Press). This is Harmon’s third map art book and features some two hundred maps of New York City, “charting every inch and facet of the five boroughs, depicting New Yorks of past and present, and a city that never was.” Fast Company Co.Design’s Meg Miller has a piece on the book. [via]

Previously: A Forthcoming Map Art Book About New York City.

Texas Monthly on Smith Map Studio

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Smith Map Studio
Smith Map Studio

Texas Monthly has a piece about Christopher Alan Smith, who for the past decade has been creating original maps, mostly of Texas and Texas-related subjects. It’s been his full-time gig since 2008. Smith uses a mixture of pen-and-ink and acrylic paints:

I tend to follow the style of postage stamps and currency. I use a pen-and-ink stipple technique, which is a series of dots that create the illusion of halftones. Cross-hatching is another method, using lines instead of dots. I’ve also started using engraved wood to give the maps a layered, 3-D look. For example, on my Thirteen Colonies map, I illustrated the coastline on two layers of hardboard.

[WMS]

River Basins in Rainbow Colours

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

river-basin-rainbow

The latest map to go viral is Robert Szucs’s dramatic and colourful map of the U.S. river basins. It’s even more spectacular in high resolution. Made with QGIS, the map separates river basin by colour and assigns stream thickness by Strahler number. I do have a couple of quibbles. The map doesn’t distinguish between the Hudson Bay and Atlantic watersheds: the Great Lakes and Red River basins are coloured the same way. And speaking of the Great Lakes, I have no idea why they look like ferns here. The map is available for sale on Etsy, along with similar maps of other countries, continents and regions. Daily Mail coverage.

Road Trees

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Road Trees project has produced animated isochrone maps showing road networks erupting fractally from a single departure point.

An isochrone in a map shows with the same color all points from which it takes the same time to arrive to a specific location.

We chose 10 locations around the world and for each of them constructed the isochrones on top of the road network of the corresponding country. Consequently, we plot these isochrones using a dynamic color palette representing the diffusion from the location of interest to any other point of the road network.

Unexpectedly, we found that the isochrones follow beautiful fractal patterns, very similar to networks shaped in the Nature by rivers, veins, or lightnings.

[Stephen Smith]

Gregor Turk’s Conflux

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Gregor Turk, Choke: Hormuz- Land (left) & Water (right). | wood and rubber | 20" x 20" x 3"
Gregor Turk, Choke: Hormuz — Land (left) and Water (right). Wood and rubber, 20″×20″× 3″.

Gregor Turk’s Conflux is on display at Spalding Nix Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia until October 28. Conflux “features wall-mounted box-like maps of global choke points, strategic locations where passage by land or sea is constricted.  Coastlines are depicted as alternating positive and negative cut-outs, framed in a grid and wrapped with repurposed rubber (bicycle inner tubes). Shadows and negative space come into play with the stark structures.” Turk’s past art includes ceramics and public art installations inspired by topographic and city maps; see also his 49th Parallel Project. [The Map as Art]

Matthew Picton Exhibition in Portland, Oregon

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Matthew Picton, Berlin Alexanderplatz (left); Moscow, The Master and Margarita (right).
Matthew Picton, Berlin Alexanderplatz (left); Moscow, The Master and Margarita (right).

An exhibition of Matthew Picton’s art is taking place at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon. The Fall runs until 29 October.

Matthew Picton’s wall-mounted sculptures constructed from paper and vellum provide aerial views of urban environments. Unlike street maps, Picton’s representations are at once cartographic, topographical and cultural, incorporating period-specific texts and popular culture ephemera. In The Fall, Picton aims to illuminate periods of struggle and transition in societies and cultures that underwent seismic upheavals through the lens of literary and cinematic imagery. These works place elements of film posters and stills within the cartographic landscape of the city in which they are set, exploring the inversions of power and authority and the moral upending of society and civilization.

[The Map as Art]

Parnasium’s Fantasy Maps of Real-World Places

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

parnasium-europe

I’ve written before about maps of the real world done in the style of fantasy maps; they’re a key piece of evidence for my argument that fantasy maps have a distinct (and limited) style. Enough of these fantasy maps of reality are being done that it’s clearly a thing now. The latest examples I’ve encountered come from an Etsy store called Parnasium. Run by a Polish designer named Karol S., it sells poster-sized maps of Europe, the United States, the British Isles, France, Italy, Japan and Poland (so far) in the style of fantasy maps. (The fact he’s using Uncial script suggests he’s primarily inspired by the Lord of the Rings movies; Uncial is fairly rare in book maps.) [Maptitude]

Karen Margolis: Maps and Holes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Karen Margolis, Lake Champlain, 2010.
Karen Margolis, Lake Champlain, 2010.

Karen Margolis burns holes in old maps to make art:

Maps offer the implicit promise of direction. Symbolizing more than just destinations or the exterior world, and composed of vascular systems and arteries, maps act as proxies for our physical selves. They grow old, become obsolete and worthless. Working with outdated, worn out maps, I enhance their colors and trace over roadways to augment their intrinsic structure and utility. I then proceed to obliterate cities and other geographic data by burning holes into the maps with a soldering iron and excising discs from the maps. Producing dislocations, the holes subvert ability to communicate coherent information, but as maps are layered on top of each other, passages emerge into new territories and interrupted routes find new connections. Possibilities open up for new areas to be generated from what was lost. I reassemble amputated map discs into mandala inspired compositions.

[The Map as Art]

A Map of Canada’s Roads and Highways

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

earthartaustralia-canada

This striking high-resolution map of Canada’s roads and highways, produced by EarthArtAustralia, is a work of GIS: it’s assembled from Canadian GIS road data, with roads coloured and weighted by importance (freeways are bright yellow, back roads are blue). This map is also inarguably a work of art: I could easily have one on my wall. It’s certainly being sold as such, with high-resolution digital downloads and prints available. (EarthArtAustralia has a number of downloadable and frameable maps based on road and waterway data: they’ve been coming at a furious clip lately.)