A specific interest in migration patterns developed alongside a general suspicion of statistical knowledge and the way subjective perceptions of our world can end up imposing one “reality” on impossibly diverse alternative truths. This natural tendency to accept basic assumptions without demur may be necessary to function in our day to day lives, but gone unchecked long enough, it can lead to a dangerously distorted sense of our society and environment.
In the context of migration politics, dominant narratives converge with the will of nonconformists to make up the subject matter of this body of work. The movements of human and animal populations following millennia-old survival instincts meet modern obstacles and threats: imagined national borders, social and political turmoil, and sweeping environmental changes. As authoritative vehicles of ‘factual information,’ the map connotes a vastness and sterile translation of our chaos into broad categories, and provides the ideal surface upon which geographies and living populations can interact. Expressed through the language of cartography, these relationships depict tension between the disputed boundaries and the silent resistance of natural survival instincts guiding the human and animal actors.
On the dim translucency of multiple layers of frosted Mylar, precise pen lines meet the eye at varying degrees, suggesting both hierarchy and regression in time with the organic forms all but obscured under the bolder man-made lines. Although each drawing derives directly from the original maps of pipelines or controversial nation-states that inspired them, topographies and borders are selected with composition and narrative in mind. In addition, I consciously maintained a commitment to abstraction to allow the viewer to delight upon their own associations of these recurring archetypes found in nature and geography. The mark-making process itself was a meditative exercise ?" numbering the vast populations that, despite being portrayed as anonymous and passive by the birds-eye scale, can transcend the barriers we have invented and homes that have been altered. With an awareness of the obvious limitations of my own mind, it is my great hope that these drawings address some of the political, social, and environmental issues that engage us in today’s changing landscape.
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