Mapping

The name of this mixed-media piece is "Area of Loss" -- it's by an artist named Francesca Berrini, represented by Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art in San Francisco, CA. It's a piece I bought during Basel at The Bridge Art Fair, and which I wanted to share with you all -- because I think her work is particularly pertinent right now. What she does: she takes old atlases and cuts pieces out of them, re-arranging them and creating new countries and rules. Here, for instance, there is a great "area of loss" in the middle of the sea and amid invented land masses, reminiscent of bodies lost at war and taken in by the tide. Or, perhaps this "area of loss" is a failed attempt at claiming the sea itself. There are other pieces in Berrini's series where she points out areas that are "beautiful" or simply that one area is point "A" and another point "B". These small fictive maps (they are about 7 X 5 inches) are important now, considering our own American perspective on the world -- perhaps she is trying to point out the ridiculous efforts of neo-colonialism and empire in a global world, while at the same time paradoxically revelling in similar ideas of claim and creation. There is a play on both Utopia and a world gone wrong in these, just as there is something both fascinating and preposterous about map-making, which points to our strengths and weaknesses as human beings -- and which she seems to have tapped into with these pieces.