16 Sep 2012

Vista: Unfolding the Mapping Process

Artists:
Silvina Arismendi, Alberto Borea, Carola Bravo, Cesar Cornejo, Priscila De Carvalho, Rodrigo Echeverri, Nicky Enright, Pilita Garcia, Gisela Insuaste, Tamara Kostianovsky, Esperanza Mayobre, Elena Patiño, José Ruiz, Camilo Sanín, Vargas-Suarez Universal, and Horacio Zabala.

For hundreds of years artists have been involved in the process of mapping as well as capturing the visible features of a site. From drawing lines on ceramic plaques to creating accurate cartographies and mathematical designs, the mapmaking activities of artists have served as a tool to resolve practical issues such as territorial and political boundaries and to outline scientific information as well as to further investigative notions of identity.

Departing from the original concept of a map and the process of its creation, this exhibition incorporates works by contemporary Latin American artists inspired by mapmaking as a creative and exploration process, including those who create compositions based on memory, identity, and utopian views of the future. This process involves outlining, charting, depicting, building, and tracing, as well as distortion and other less cartographical techniques.

Through structures, abstractions, urban landscapes, installations, and new media, Vista reveals different approaches to the process of understanding territory from the social to the personal, from the concrete to the abstract, from the exceptional to the conventional. All the artworks have been brought together to encourage debate, to show the different possibilities of maps, and to further our understanding of them as evolving social, political, and cultural constructions derived from changing cosmologies and canons.