American artist Karen O’Leary reimagines the map as an exchange of negative and positive space. Deftly cutting maps of New York, Paris and London with razor precision, she leaves delicate webs of streets as land and water are cut away. Negative space demarcates land, while meandering grids of paper represents streets.

There is an interview with the artist here.

More information about this work:
http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/11/hand-cut_maps.html
http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2009/11/karen_olearys_c.php

This group exhibition at the England & Co. gallery is the latest in an occasional series of exhibitions of artists using maps and map-making strategies.

Jason Wallis-Johnson: London USA (detail)

Works by artists including: Chris Kenny, Michael Druks, Georgia Russell, Jason Wallis-Johnson, Grayson Perry, 
Rolf Brandt, Cornelia Parker, Terry Ryan, Abigail Reynolds, Jonathan Callan, Deirdre Jackson, Alberto Duman, Vito Drago, Margaret Proudfoot, Richard Wentworth, Jugoslav Vlahovic, Paul Tecklenberg and Satomi Matoba.

7-28 November. Private View Friday 13 November 6 to 8:30 pm
England & Co. Gallery.
216 Westbourne Grove
London
W11 2RH

Thanks to Tinho da Cruz for posting this information via CARTO-SoC, the Society of Cartographers Mailing List.

An exhibition devoted to the role of indigenous peoples in the history of exploration can be seen in London these days. There is also a website containing many images, film clips and research materials from the Royal Geographical Society collections: www.rgs.org/hiddenhistories

15 October – 10 December 2009
Location: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Exhibition Road, London

Hidden Histories of Exploration reveals the contribution of people such as Juan Tepano, Mohammed Jen Jamain, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, Nain Singh and Pedro Caripoco to the history of exploration. Find out about their role and its lasting significance, as illustrated in the paintings, books, maps photographs, artefacts and manuscripts of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Materials from Africa, Asia, the Arctic and the Americas are respresented, with highlights including paintings by Thomas Baines, Catherine Frere’s sketches of women on an African expedition, and film from the 1922 Everest expedition.

Evert Schut uses “Google Earth as a source of inspiration” to paint landscapes and to address issues related to the environment. I am not sure Google Earth, and virtual globes in general, can serve to stimulate the revival of lanscape painting as Evert suggests, but it has certainly stimulated the emergence of new forms of hybridations between cartography and art.

This blog is literally all about a new perspective for landscape painting: looking down on earth from a satellite up there in space! Google Earth has made it possible for anyone with a computer and internet to roam the Earth like a birds or even an astronout. For an artist like me this has become a huge new source of inspiration. Is this the revival landscape painting needs?

The symposium “Monitoring Scenography 3: Space and Desire / Raum und Begehren” (October 8th to 10th,  2009), will take place at the Institute for Design and Technology (idt) in Zurich.

In the 3 day symposium MONITORING SCENOGRAPHY 3: SPACE AND DESIRE, artistic and academic researchers in the visual arts, architecture, theatre studies and art history discuss the existence and textures of spatial languages, choreographies, mise-en-scenes and spatial representations of desire.
The scenographies of desire are both site-specific and global, artistic and commercial, real and virtual. Success stories in popular culture, advertisement and marketing rely heavily on a carefully designed analysis of desire and its translation into product-specific scenographies. In the staged and mediatised lives of the 21st century, the spaces of desire take on many forms. Inscribed onto them is the desire for uniqueness, inimitability and immersion – as both service and response to the spectacle.
MONITORING SCENOGRAPHY 3: SPACE AND DESIRE is the third in a series of annual symposia curated by the members of the Doctorate Program Scenography, a practice-based research unit between the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Vienna. Its members are a diverse and international group of emerging and established artists and academics engaged in expanding the discourse on scenography toward the intersection of architecture, media, theatre and exhibition.

Podcasts from the previous symposium on Space and Truth are also available from the web site.

In the context of the exhibition ‘The Importancy of the unimportant’ (20 September – 30 November), at the Hudson Museum (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) we will find the work of the artist Aquil Copier. Oil, airbrush, photoprint and acrylic for painting (should we say mapping!?) landscapes. Enjoy!

Oil and airbrush on canvas (diptich). 200x150 cm. 2008

Heavenly Heights is the title of this picture, which it isn’t actually a picture  but a drawing. It doesn’t exist any real image beneath this one, just Ross Racine’s digital paintbrushes for designing non-existent aerial  scenes like this.  Enjoy!

Here you are a “deductive-image”. It depicts the Appalachian mountain range by using only individual road segments. Expressive result taken from “All Streets“, an  interesting project by Ben Fry.

“All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.”

This artfully crafted map by Melissa Gould is a thoughtprovoking experiment – a narrative map, covering a fiercly discussed topic of alternate history: What if the Nazis had won World War 2? An extract from the artist’s comment, available on the project website: “NEU-YORK is a cautionary meditation, suggesting what the local geographical reality might have been like had victorious Nazis succeeded in bringing the Third Reich across the Atlantic Ocean in 1945. At the same time it is an exploration of psychological transport, place, displacement and memory. This re-imagining of the city plays with comparison and misrecognition, exploring the coexistence of past and present, fiction and reality.”

For more information, map samples and an overview see: http://www.megophone.com/neuyork.html

This video is not really about maps… Or may be it is, just like it is about geology, urban planning, aerodynamism, nutrition, design and many other things. But mostly it is about mapping out the fairy tale Little red riding hood and it is just great! Thanks to Amelia Bryne for pointing us to this video.