maps

On those weekends when I return home to the plastic suburban artifice of Orange County, escaping the concrete claustrophobia of LA, there's always one positive distinction going for OC: the air. On those late nights when I step into my backyard, living near the canyon, I can glimpse a breath of nature's air, only hear the faint distortion of cars and street hassle, and see the stars instead of imposing commerce. Sometimes, I feel most of us have forgotten the beauty of simply looking up and appreciating and embracing our smallness next to the vastness of the stars.

How significant is the materialization of the modern map in this transgression? The flatness of the modern maps, appropriated to fit politically, distorts our understanding of space-time compression. Driving from LA to New Mexico is a venturous 12-hour trip. Yet, on the map, merely a couple states over, a few inches apart.

I've been intrigued by the concept of maps. Not only as a means geographically, but generally, as a primal expression of teaching and learning. My next artistic foray will be in conceptual maps: embracing the profound simplicity of cave drawings and primal expression, but elaborating in a brainstorm-graphing format to explain concepts in an approachable manner, curtailing the academic superfluousness. A basic and instructional process of storytelling, with the most important variant, visual accompaniment. I can't really articulate what I mean by this, but kinda like a blend of da Vinci, Basquiat, and Dali.

Riffing off this, I've been feeling out this idea of "layered cinema", for lack of a better term. When drawing free-associatively, every shape becomes the same, every form the same form. The image, which begins as seemingly disconnected impulses, ultimately becomes a unified image. With cinema, or rather moving pictures, does continuously superimposing and dissolving images one on top of the next in the same way conceptual still art does, deduce into this same profound singularity of vision?