[Editor’s note: I picked up this fascinating read while in San Francisco earlier this month and devoured the artwork and critical essays by Gayle Clemans on the flight back to DC. Features pieces by Maya Lin and Paula Scher previously mentioned here. Thanks Jag!]
Artists & designers using the map medium for experimental art & innovation http://su.pr/2sijN4
Republished from BrainPickings.
What tattoo art has to do with fashion, vintage atlases and Nazi concentration camps.
We’ve always been fascinated by maps — through various elements of design, from typography to color theory to data visualization, they brilliantly condense and capture complex notions about space, scale, topography, politics and more. But where things get most interesting is that elusive intersection of the traditional and the experimental, where artists explore the map medium as a conceptual tool of abstract representation. And that’s exactly what The Map of the Art, a fantastic Morning News piece by Katharine Harmon, examines.
Corriette Schoenaerts, ‘Europe,’ 2005
Schoenaerts, a conceptual photographer living in Amsterdam, constructs countries and continents out of clothing.
Qin Ga, ‘Site 22: Mao Zedong Temple,’ 2005
In 2002, China’s Long March Project embarked upon a ‘Walking Visual Display’ along the route of the 1934-1936 historic 6000-mile Long March, and Beijing-based artist Qin kept tracked the group’s route in a tattooed map on his back. Three years later, Qin continued the trek where the original marchers had left off, accompanied by a camera crew and a tattoo artist, who continually updated the map on Qin’s back.
Continue reading at BrainPickings . . .
Tags: art, brainpickings, color theory, data, Design, experimental, gayle clemans, jag, Katharine Harmon, map, maya lin, paula scher, politics, san francisco, scale, space, tattoo, topography, typography, visualization