MEASURE/MEDIATE
Measure/Mediate, 2024, unique artist’s book with 11 unbound map-folded pages printed with letterpress and photo transfers on paper. Original photographs were taken by geographer Lee Lines. Enclosure is a custom engraved wooden box with acrylic lid. Signed by the artist. Closed dimensions are 10” x 7” x 3”. Display dimensions are variable, but each page measures 12.5” x 17.5” when flat.
In the unique artist’s book Measure/Mediate, photo transfers depicting developed landscapes from the US, Iceland and Europe are layered with fragmented grids and a fluorescent 1980’s color palette, evoking the loud, but hollow promises of capitalism and its dominance over nature. The map-folded pages can be opened and closed, revealing vivid slogans and critiques; or they can opened and turned upside down to mimic the structure of a house. When all the pages are opened as such, they form a suburban neighborhood where all homes are identical in shape and size. The maps are printed with phrases like “market landslide” and “engineered legacy” that speak to invisible agendas and global events that can become conduits for (dis)functionality in the landscape.
Influenced by landscape architecture and environmental ethics, this project aims to connect several ideas— that human desires are created by the market, that our devotion to capitalism is fueled by an addiction to perpetual distraction, and that we see ourselves as more and more disconnected from nature. Reshaped by rapid technological progress, hope and innovation, but also by conflict, destruction and capitalist greed, the developed landscape is a physical manifestation of our human desire to shape the world as we see fit.
On the other hand, despite all our attempts to measure and mediate, tame and sanitize, idealize and/or ignore it, the wilderness remains stubbornly unfixed. Unaffected by free market pressures, nature continually disrupts mercurial human plans with a repetitive onslaught of landslides, earthquakes, floods and maintains the steady migration paths of the wildebeest and the sand hill crane.