Beyond Art

The lecture from tuesday by Dr. Ruth Mostern and the readings for thursday were very informative. Mostern's lecture had given me a better insight on how digital maps can be used for a variety of reasons and how the high level of privacy is diminishing as technology advances. But one detail from the week that caught my curiosity the most was the motive behind Joyce Kozloff's and Susan Crile's art work. Throughout this course I've learned that maps are more than a piece of paper with roads and contour lines. A map can represent an opinion, history, or an ideology; and a map can be art that shows/explains a story.  Susan Crile's artwork caught my interest because her paintings consist of "realistic colors from earthbound" and display the vertical perspective from the air. Since the vertical perspective does not have the same colors as ground level, Crile's choice of using vibrant colors makes the artwork/map more abstract, but at the same time reveals its meaning. For example, Crile's website has a section called Fires of War, and one piece of artwork that I thought was interesting was "Primordial Scene." This piece of art uses vibrant colors of a fire such as red and yellow, but in reality if we are from a far distance the fire would appear as a light and faint yellow/orange flame. Also, I think it is clever how for Joyce Kozloff "maps and mapping are evidence of human ideologies and actions, exploitations and imperfections, [and] through them she examines our relationships with history, each other, and our world"(Clemans 34). From Kozloff's website, a piece of artwork that I found fascinating was "Dark and Light Continents," which is under the section 1993-2002 Mapping Works. This painting caught my eye because 1) it is formed by 12 narrow and flattened canvases connected by the equator and 2) represents the legacy of the Enlightenment (Kozloff).