Watershed Anecdotes

“What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”

            Michel DeCerteau

With the Watershed Anecdotes I seek to combine the logic of the map with that of the story, to fuse an abstract understanding of space with a lived experience of space.  

In general, the Watershed Anecdotes address my long-time fascination with this question:  Cartesian space provides an abstract, universal matrix into which modern life is set.  Lacking a grid, how would we register one system of experiences, events, objects in relation to larger wholes?  And why do we try?  Can we recover landmarks now buried within contemporary landscapes?

The series is organized around watersheds, which follow the logic of gravity, water and earth, rather than a logic of apportioning legal ownership.  Through these works I try to imagine how humans might have understood their environment before western settlement arrived.  In this way, I hope to recover/uncover meaningful places defined by the forms of the planet rather than commercial or administrative forces.

This series incorporates a range of media and methods.  

The maps begin with drawings made with my body, as I walk local landscapes.  They are recorded using MotionX, an iPhone app that tracks my walks in real time, and that can be imported into GIS software.  These walks (around 100, done across the course of a year) are incorporated into basic GIS maps, using data sets, primarily provided by the USGS, including topography and hydrology.  The maps are printed on canvas, then manipulated. 

The small paintings are presented as diptychs—a story and a map. I refer to them as anecdotes because they record a specific place and time of year, one that occurs once a year, or perhaps once ever. Like any anecdote, they memorialize the smallest unit of lived, imageable meaning.  These are done in gouache on Strathmore, or oil on canvas.