TWENTY SUMMERS INSTALLATION: MAY 2024: IMPERMANENCE
STATEMENT

Over the past six or seven years I have focused on cutting away certain areas of maps, creating lace-like pages of roads, rivers, and other geographical features. These are then protected between sheets of acrylic, in boxes, or safely mounted on panels.

For my site-specific installation at Twenty Summers, I will embrace the fragility of the pages, leaving them unprotected and open to whatever might happen when people also enter the space. I envision hundreds of cut maps hanging from the beams, perhaps randomly, perhaps in a specific layout.

I’m interested in how people will interact with them - will they wait for permission to touch them, to walk through them? Will they worry about damaging the individual pieces, or see themselves as part of the installation, as catalysts for changing it? Will they be delighted, or irritated, by the pieces being in their way? If, at the end of the project, I tell them they can take a small piece of it home, will they embrace that idea, or see it as destroying the whole?

I have a sense of the installation being somewhat representative of the world, in particular the fragility of the planet and how we are failing to take care of it.

But I also like the idea that it spreads through the community and parts of it live on wherever people put the pieces that they take. I see the whole as ephemeral and removing some of the individual elements does not diminish it. And maybe, during future iterations of the installation, more will be added, and it will continually evolve; perhaps becoming a permanent part of my art practice.