“Maps for Navigating to a New Perspective - New York Times” plus 1 more |
| Maps for Navigating to a New Perspective - New York Times Posted: 03 Dec 2010 08:09 PM PST What are maps for? Of course, you think you know, and so did I — until I found my way to "Mapping: Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art," at the Katonah Museum of Art. The works in this terrific exhibition offer so many takes on the subject that you feel your personal definition of cartography exploding as you walk — with no map to guide you — through the galleries. Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery"South Pole" (2009), by Lordy Rodriguez. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery"Voyages 19: Pola" (2004), by Joyce Kozloff. Norman Akers"Okesa" (2010), by Norman Akers. For some of the show's 38 artists, existing maps serve as raw material to be turned into sculptures, collages and such. For others, a map is the end result, created from experience or imagination to fix a place, a time or an idea. But all these objects, gathered by the guest curator, Sarah Tanguy, force you to reckon with maps as aids to meditation, objects of pleasure, blueprints for war, records of subjugation. And oh, yes, I almost forgot: as tools for getting from here to there and back again. Locating "here" can become tricky, however. You'll get lost if you try to follow Karey Ellen Kessler's fascinating maplike drawings — they'll pilot you no farther than her psyche. Kysa Johnson tracks the travel paths of subatomic particles in swirling colored lines — there's no Lonely Planet accompanying her map, either. At first glance, Lordy Rodriguez's delineations of the North and South Poles seem nearer our traditional notions of what a map should be. But closer examination reveals that these two ink drawings literally upend our sense of the globe, reordering our perspective and providing a biting commentary on it as well. Several of the maps on view document not just what is, or what might be, but what is no longer. In her "Voyages" series, Joyce Kozloff reproduces antique maps of faraway islands on Venetian carnival masks. The titles — "Pola," "Nova Guinea," "Pulo Penang" — and the colorful painted backgrounds evoke the varied cultures that once thrived on those islands; the sameness of the masks and their empty eyeholes suggest the way the Western gaze reduced such places to spoils of empire. In "Okesa," which means "halfway there" in Osage, Norman Akers overlays a schematic depiction of the tribe's reservation with a realistic painting of a panicked elk. Oversize acorns imply that perhaps regeneration is possible; but this is a map of destruction. The artists who manipulate existing maps often create dense visual puns. In "Highland Dress," Susan Stockwell turns Victorian-era government maps of Scotland into a 19th-century gown, repurposing their long blue lochs into ribbonlike accents for the bell-shaped skirt and their bright-red contour lines into embroidery for the bust and shoulders. The sculpture, elegant and eerie, reminds us that one diminutive woman once ruled an empire on which the sun never set. Books of maps rather than individual ones are the medium for Doug Beube. In "Crater," he carves out hollows of various depths, rendering a large atlas useless but creating a powerful topography of his own. The atlas in "Invisible Cities" is equally unreadable, its pages folded and sewn into a pleated cylinder capped at both ends with a decorative metal finial. Ms. Tanguy compares it to a reliquary; I see a miniature Torah. In either case, the map has been transformed into an object of reverence. Matthew Cusick uses maps not for sculpture but for painting. Created from inlaid bits of 1960s and '70s road maps, his 2004 "Transamerican" depicts a Pontiac Firebird, flaming eagle hood decal and all. Made prior to the bailout of General Motors but after the demise of the storied muscle car, the work reads almost like prophecy these days. From a distance, the car has a ghostly presence; as you get closer, it disappears into the map fragments, like a mirage. There are similar phantasms in Lincoln Schatz's shimmering video, which shows a man using a compass and other navigational tools to chart a journey. The point of view shifts constantly, and overlapping sequences fade in and out like dreams. There's something utterly compelling about the contrast between the precision of the task and the hazy, computer-generated flow of images. And the man turns out to be J. Craig Venter, who found a way to map the mapmakers when he plotted the human genome. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Field guides help weed out bad, invasive plants - San Francisco Gate Posted: 03 Dec 2010 04:12 PM PST Field guides can help determine if a plant is a weed - like this prolific and pesky Scotch broom. Third of three parts. What's that plant? It just popped up, it's in my new garden, it's coming over the fence - is it a weed? Oddly, it's difficult to find a comprehensive weed guide specific to the Bay Area or California. Natural History of Vacant Lots, by Matthew Vessel and Herbert Wong (UC Press), is a good introduction to common weeds of "disturbed" areas. Weeds of the West, edited by Tom Whitson (University of Wyoming), has something of a High Plains tilt. Weeds, by Alexander Martin in the Golden Guide series, is nationwide in scope but illustrates only a hundred or so species. UC Press' authoritative Invasive Plants of California's Wildlands, edited by Carla Bossard, John Randall and Marc Hoshovsky, is about exotics that have jumped the garden fence - arguably a scarier problem, and important to know about before buying or propagating plants. The California Invasive Plants Council's excellent website ( www.cal-ipc.org) has illustrations and range maps for problematic species, some of which are, incredibly, still being marketed. Guides to wild plantsFor wild plants in general, there are two options: field guides and floras. Plant field guides are mostly visual, often organized by flower color or leaf shape rather than by taxonomic relationships. Floras are more technical, with fewer illustrations, and use dichotomous keys and text descriptions to identify species. Plant keys can be challenging, sometimes requiring a hand lens if not a microscope, and access to a plant part (flower, seed) that may not be there when you're trying to key it out. The grandparent of all California floras is the Jepson Manual (UC Press), now in its second edition and currently being revised. The Jepson is a hefty volume; you could probably stun a bear with it. We suspect that only hard-core and muscular botanists take it into the field. Less cumbersome is Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region, by Linda Beidleman and Eugene Kozloff (UC Press), which has good photographs. Other floras deal with counties (like the recently revised Marin Flora from the California Academy of Sciences and California Native Plant Society), or places like national parks or islands. Some are available through the CNPS website ( www.cnps.org/store.php). Field guides usually cover only a particular duchy of the plant kingdom: trees, shrubs, wildflowers, ferns. Our favorite wildflower guide is Theodore Niehaus' Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers, a Peterson guide from Houghton Mifflin. It hasn't been revised since 1976, and some terminology is outdated. Still, it's reasonably comprehensive and user-friendly. Other field guides deal with smaller areas: the redwood region, the Wine Country, the Sierra. Tree IDFor tree identification, David Sibley's Sibley Guide to Trees (Knopf) is formatted like his popular bird guide and just as impressive. George Petrides' Field Guide to Western Trees (Houghton Mifflin) is useful too, with beautifully detailed leaf illustrations. More locally, the UC Press California Natural History Guides series includes Introduction to Trees of the San Francisco Bay Region by Glenn Keator and Trees and Shrubs of California by John Stuart and John Sawyer. All of these also cover at least some of the nonnative tree species you're likely to meet. For deeper understanding, Cachuma Press has several handsome large-format paperbacks on California trees: Oaks of California by Bruce Pavlik and others, Conifers of California by Ronald Lanner, and Coast Redwood: A Natural and Cultural History, edited by John Evarts and Marjorie Popper. Also from Cachuma: Stephen Ingram's Cacti, Agaves, and Yuccas of California and Nevada. Any tree-hugger needs Donald Culross Peattie's "A Natural History of Western Trees," evocative essays about their life history and cultural context. Last reissued in 1991, it may be out of print but not hard to find; check used-book stores and online, or see "A Natural History of North American Trees," an abridged version Houghton Mifflin published in 2007. Don't miss Glenn Keator's "The Life of an Oak" (Heyday Books). For another kingdom, fungi, we love David Arora's classic "Mushrooms Demystified" and his pocket guide, "All That the Rain Promises and More," both from Ten Speed Press. "Demystified" even includes recipes. Don't rely on books alone for 'shrooming: "There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters." This article appeared on page M - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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