Mapping the Mind

BY: PROVOKR Editors

Maps provide useful data. They point you towards any destination you may desire. However, rarely are maps frenetic with energy and subjectivity, but the artist and designer Paula Scher might change your mind with her latest exhibition. Entitled The Art of Map Design, and presented by Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York, Scher manages to surprise by inverting the requirements of a map. Rather than orderly geography, Scher has created prints that feel like a sensory jolt filled with movement and color.

As a child, Scher developed her interest in maps because of her father, who happened to be a civil engineer. Over the past decade she created this body of work, some of which were completed as recently as this year. Each piece, as you may guess, is a map depicting various metropolises or even the world. Often times trade routes, cities, or transportation systems will guide her process and provide unique compositional structures, but all of these maps share a distinct visual vocabulary. They are brightly colored, text is scrawled over the entire surface, and this text causes a rippling, lyrical movement across the surface of these works. There is also hand-drawn quality, which is another sign that precision isn’t the goal here.

So what do these maps do if they’re not accurate? Scher instead puts forward an excess of information and data. Some of these routes and locales were gleaned from personal knowledge, some from research, and some from media sources. Rather than an encyclopedic depiction of a city or region, these maps are amalgamations of memory and culture. Instead of something that is designed for any person to navigate their city or world, they are products created by and for an individual’s experiences. They may not function as a traditional map, but they are a fascinating as reflections of the artist and our global community at large.