“Updated multi-lingual map for Watertown now available - Abington Mariner” plus 1 more |
| Updated multi-lingual map for Watertown now available - Abington Mariner Posted: 05 Dec 2010 12:28 PM PST The World in Watertown has recently released an updated version of the multi-lingual map geared towards helping immigrant families navigate and acclimate to the town. According to Will Twombly of The World in Watertown, when the first map was created there were several errors in the printed map because the designer, Leslie Evans, wasn't able to find an accurate map to guide her. Since the initial printing in 2008, feedback and corrections have been collected and are reflected in the newest version of the map. The police station is now in its new location on Main Street and the photograph of the town dock, which floated away during the March floods, has been replaced with one of the Watertown Free Library. "I think it is a great choice for the image because it's the home of Project Literacy," Twombly said. "It is a very familiar spot for a lot of immigrant or non-English speaking people who are coming to Watertown for the first time. It's one of the places they get to know and feel comfortable with early on. We wanted to use that image as a way to put something familiar on the map and something welcoming." Susan Viskin, program director of Project Literacy, said she helped identify five languages largely represented in town – English, Chinese, Western Armenian, Russian, and Portuguese – and then enlisted graduates of Project Literacy to help translate information. "It gives new people in town a resource for English and non-English speakers to see where schools and public buildings are," Viskin said. "It's a good starting place for new people in town and having the language accessibility is really nice. I wish we could be doing it in more languages." The map can help residents figure out where they register their children for school, find healthcare resources, and how to use public transportation, among many other services available in Watertown. "We try to include as much practical information as possible," Twombly said. "I think the map is important because it's unique, as far as I know, and it provides important information to speakers of other languages who might not have access to it from any other source. It will hopefully make them feel more comfortable, welcome and oriented in the community." Copies of the map, which was produced by the World in Watertown, Project Literacy, the Parent Child Home Program and the Watertown Police Department, are available at the Watertown Free Library, Town Hall, the public schools and other locations. For more information, contact The World in Watertown at 35 Church St.
Laura Paine can be reached at lpaine@cnc.com. 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 |
| 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 |
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