Curator / Vaughn Bell

Groundtruthing

Margot Anne Kelley
Bruce Myren
Tara Rodgers
Thom Heileson
Vaughn Bell
Sarah Kavage
Nicole Kistler

August 2 – 26, 2007

Groundtruthing brings us artists from across the country, each with a different approach to the idea of going “on location.”  With current mapping technology such as GIS, remote sensing, and GPS devices we can know the surface of the earth with more detail and specificity then ever. The artists in this exhibition access mapping technologies and data as a resource in examining geography as a personal and social phenomenon. Using media including photography, video, sound, and performance, these artists explore the significance of topography.  The work gives us an experience of both the journey and the destination, and develops new narratives of how we relate to the places we visit, inhabit and explore.

Margot Anne Kelley is a photographer based in Cambridge, MA whose photographic project, Local Treasures, began when she learned about “geocacheing” a game in which individuals leave treasures in special places for others to find using gps receivers. Kelley asked “What would America look like when mapped by thousands of individuals who are highlighting their own preferred places?”  Her photographs bring us a glimpse of these places.

Bruce Myren, based in Boston, uses photography to show us a cross section of the country, drawn along the 40th parallel and selected based on the points of intersection with lines of longitude. His large-format photographs bring us panoramas of these normally unrecognized places, made significant by their location on the coordinate plane.

Tara Rodgers is a sound artist currently residing in Montreal. Places I've lived in and Traveled To, 1973-2005 is an audiovisual composition tracking her own movement patterns throughout her life.  The data of latitude, longitude and altitude are translated into a sound and visual composition, a waveform representation of the movement through space.

Seattle-based Thom Heileson’stwo-channel video, Scend, interplays the experience of ascending and descending.  Shot traveling from the lowest point in Death Valley to an elevation of one mile above sea level, the literal transition in altitude is transformed through the mental impacts of the drive into a hypnotic, perpetual journey.

In the collaborative project Watermark, Seattle artists Vaughn Bell, Sarah Kavage and Nicole Kistler map the line through Seattle that could be the city’s future shoreline.  Using topographic data and estimates of possible sea-level rise in various climate change scenarios, they delineate where the floods could rise.  Performance actions mark the line throughout downtown Seattle.  With this piece, viewers can become participants to go on location themselves, through a performance action or a walking tour.