Hudson (Show)Room Exhibition: City Maps

Erik Benson, Janice Caswell, Alex Lopez, and Ruth Root
04.04.04

about the exhibition and artists

If given free reign to design a map of your city, what would it look like? It
might follow convention, mathematically plotting the relationships between
streets and neighborhoods. But perhaps yours would represent urban space
more abstractly and personally. Rather than a purely geographic map, yours
might be a mental map.

The artists included in City Maps have chosen the latter strategy. Erik
Benson (Brooklyn, NY), Janice Caswell (New York, NY), Alex Lopez (San
Antonio, TX), and Ruth Root (New York, NY) have created colorful guides that
convey their feelings about a town rather than charting the space between one
quadrant and the next. These abstract works question whether the methodical
graphing of space is any more useful than the depiction of what one might
experience in it.

In the 1950s French theorist and artist Guy Debord began creating
"psychogeographic" guides to Paris. Based not only on geographic markers but
also on Debord's experiences drifting through the city, they emphasized his
reactions to urban space, not just what it looked like. Four decades later
postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson hinted at the social potentiality of such
ordering in his essay "Cognitive Mapping."2 He proposed that in the present
phase of multinational?late?italism, there is a growing disconnect
between "Wesen and Erscheinung, essence and appearance,
structure and lived experience."3

Mental maps help navigate the disjointed cityscape by asserting the importance
of subjectivity and human experience. The artists in City Maps follow in
Debord's footsteps and have taken up Jameson's task.

Erik Benson's panoramic paintings teeter between abstraction and
representation?ultaneously appearing fantastic and rooted in reality.
Through drying acrylic paint on a glass surface, cutting strips of the hardened
pigment, and applying them to the painted canvas, he constructs intricate />
cityscapes that are monumental in scale. This building process mirrors his
subject: the city's

architecture. Dried acrylic highways, apartments, and other structures shimmer
off of beige canvas; spots of unnatural color (hot greens articulate
windowpanes) add a surreal effect. Missing from these quiet, street-level views
of the city are people. The dreamy depictions suggest an urban space where
architecture displaces those who use it. Benson's guides focus on the way we
move through parks and streets, hinting at how they exist in memories, and
proposing that architecture gives life to us just as we bring life to it.

Janice Caswell's intimate guides trace human (and sometimes
animal) movements, leaving out the structures and the representation
entirely. On small sheets of white paper Caswell connects swarms of colored
dots with drawn lines, creating delicate, bird's eye views of how urban space is
traversed. A line begins at a small cluster of green and yellow points, meanders
without stopping, and then loops in and out of a dense metropolis of orange
and blue. Areas that receive repeat visits have a multitude of dots and a web of
lines?er regions remain entirely untouched. These slight gestures
poignantly evoke the idiosyncratic ways we use urban space. Some of us avoid
the center in favor of familiar neighborhoods; others fan out across the whole
city. These maps embody Debord's idea of psycho-geography?t people
use cities in ways that defy careful structural planning. Caswell's compositions
describe spaces that are, above all, inhabited.

Floating several inches from the wall, Alex Lopez's colored
aluminum panels are detailed with spare slips of contrasting pinstriping.
Untitled/Little Deaths (2003) is a series of abstract "snapshots" of
suburban infrastructure seemingly taken from above. A thin orange line racing
and circling across a field of blue signifies a freeway. A watery arc and sprinkle
of tiny yellow circles cut through an inky black background suggests a moonlit
river and cluster of homes. While calling attention to zones that are frequently
marginalized in portrayals of the city (parking lots, roadways, rivers, streetlights)
the depictions are melancholic and

contemplative. It is unclear whether suburbia is to be feared or celebrated.
Lopez's works scrutinize the periphery, mapping what life looks like outside the
city center.

Ruth Root applies thick strokes of enamel paint onto irregularly
edged metal sheets. Purple squares, gray rectangles, and other asymmetrical
shapes lock together like the jigsawed districts of many growing cities. Just as
urban boundaries do not adhere to straight lines, each painting bulges here and
pokes out there. Root extends the aluminum beyond the four-sided frame the
eye imagines: a yellow patch stretches "south" creating a vertical composition
that has the island shape of Manhattan; a rounded corner of purple swells
"east" and creates a lumpy rectangle that could be Berlin. While these untitled
works are firmly grounded in abstraction, they simultaneously bear a strong
relationship to urban mapmaking. Rather than guides to specific places, Root's
works are reminders of the segmented way we often think about, and
experience, urban space.

While geographic maps are rooted in physical proximity, the works in City
Maps are grounded in the psyche. Benson, Caswell, Lopez, and Root
fabricate their understandings of the city by way of their emotional, temporal, and
psychophysical responses to it. They create links between memory, perception
and physicality?ultaneously destabilizing notions about traditional
maps and offering alternatives. These maps may be personal guides to city
spaces, but they are no less useful for making sense of the often bewildering
contemporary landscape.

An example of that work is Discours sur les passions de l'amour
(1957), which was included in Mapping, a 1994 exhibition curated by
Robert Storr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY which focused on the
geographic map as an artistic motif.

2Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1988) 347-357.

3Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," 349.

artist biographies

Erik Benson received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design,
Providence, RI (2001). He has had solo exhibitions at RARE, New York, NY
(2003), and at Finesilver / FYI, San Antonio, TX (2003). He has been included in
group exhibitions at Angles, Santa Monica, CA (2003-04); the Center for
Curatorial Studies at Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2003); and the Bronx
Museum of the Arts, NY (2002).

Janice Caswell received her BA in Philosophy from the University of Missouri,
Columbia, MO (1985) and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
(1998). She has had a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary
Art, Ridgefield, CT (2003), and been included in group shows at Galerie Anne
Barrault, Paris, France (2004); Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY (2003);
Schroeder Romero, Brooklyn, NY (2003); and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY
(2002).

Alex Lopez received his MFA from Alfred University, NY (1996). He
has been included in group exhibitions at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
(2003); the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2002); Blue Star
Contemporary Art Space, San Antonio, TX (2002); and The McKinney Avenue
Contemporary, Dallas, TX (1999). He was included in Glow: Aspects of Light
in Contemporary American Art, which traveled to a number of Texas spaces
in 2002-03, including Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin (2002).

Ruth Root received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago, IL (1993). Solo exhibitions include: Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York,
NY (2003, 2001, 1999); Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy (2000); and Nylon
gallery, London, England (2000). She has been in group exhibitions at the Seattle
Art Museum, WA (2003, 2002); Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York, NY (2003);
ACME, Los Angeles, CA (2002); and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long
Island City, NY (2000).

Exhibition Dates

February 4 pril 18, 2004

Panel Discussion and Reception

Thursday, April 1, 6:30 - 8:00 PM, panel discussion followed by reception. City
Maps artists will participate in a conversation about the exhibition, and how
lived experience and emotion can transform understandings of place. Discussion
moderated by the exhibition's curator, Kate Green, ArtPace's Education and
Curatorial Associate.

Brown Bag Lunch

Wednesday, February 25, 12:00-1:00 PM

Join ArtPace for a gallery walk-thru with the curator of City Maps and a
brown bag lunch provided by Sip. Please call ArtPace to make reservations.

Event Location

All events held at ArtPace, 445 N. Main Avenue. Free parking at N. Flores and
Savings Streets. ArtPace is open to the public Wednesday thru Sunday, 12-5
PM, Thursday 12-8 PM, and by appointment. There is no charge for
admission.

About ArtPace

ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio serves as an
advocate for contemporary art and as a catalyst for the creation of significant art
projects. We seek to nurture emerging and established artists and to provide
opportunities for inspiration, experimentation and education. Through our
International Artist-in-Residence Program, we invite nine artists annually to
participate in a two-month residency which supports the evolution of new ideas in
art. Our broad range of panels, lectures, artist talks, and studio visits cultivates
diverse audiences for contemporary art and provides a forum for ongoing
dialogue.

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org