RECOMMENDED This show re-defines a map as a “sinuous [and] crystalline network” through which organizer Mike Wolf and friends traverse radical spaces. The exhibit includes video installation, painted canvas and an anti-RNC 2008 activist message board, yet the collaborators understand their relationship to place in mostly intangible forms, that is, as interactions with individuals. Distances become form, information and record. Within the gallery is a reading library composed of works from the collection of Xexial Editions of Lima, Wisconsin, offering a great variety of bound objects exploring topics including creation and mimesis. Central to the show are two maps in the rear of the gallery. “All The World’s A Battlefield” is a theater of Wolf’s experiences in the Midwest. Here, north is not drawn as “up,” and the horizon between the terrestrial and the skies can clearly be seen. Stars take the names of friends who influenced him along the way. “The Eastern Sioux Atlas,” by the late Paul Durand, is a map of waterways and lakes named only in the Sioux language. This map, containing information that at once seems so foreign yet in its thoroughness so interesting, demands a reconsideration of the very logic used in deciding what information best can communicate a given landscape. Screenings and presentations accompany the exhibit, see Web site for details. (Lisa Larson-Walker) Through November 17 at Roots and Culture, 1034 North Milwaukee
Related Stories
Lives Lost: A Site of Struggle Presents the Complexity and Complicity of Anti-Black Violence The works on view serve to memorialize the many lives lost, allowing space and resources to mourn those individuals, and to process both the dark histories of the United States as well as the bold acts of resistance. Hopefully the exhibition moves visitors beyond rage or grief or empathy into action.
