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Francesca Berrini
Berrini transforms vintage maps of places she has
longed to visit into fine art maps of entirely new and imagined worlds using an
obsessive, yet painterly, map reconstitution process
ON EXHIBIT: October 12th – November 13th, 2005
Reception on Friday October 14th, 6 – 10 PM
Francesca
Berrini transforms vintage maps of places she has longed to visit into fine art
maps of entirely new and imagined worlds. She obsessively tears up original
vintage maps into tiny pieces, and then reconstitutes them, using a painterly
process, into new maps and directional devices that reflect a longing for places
unseen.
Francesca Berrini
Portfolio
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Biography
Hireo (detail) by Francesca Berrini
At first glance, from afar, Berrini's works look
like a collection of high-quality maps and atlases with unfamiliar continents
and geographic markings. As you examine the details of the maps a bit closer,
and try to follow the geographic and geopolitical information displayed, you do
a double-take as you realize that the maps themselves are actually constructed
from miniscule pieces of other maps, forming new terrain, new geographies, and
new names of places in entirely new languages. Berrini maintains the abstract
language of maps, yet plays with our notions of their unspoken authority and
overall usability.
By recycling different visions of the world, past
and present, Berrini hopes to capture her nostalgia for the places that she has
not been to. "The creation of maps has historically been a painstaking process,
meticulously striving for accuracy. I aim to slowly create a separate world from
the scraps of my current fascinations. I am reforming the world that is
available to me piece by piece to reflect my imagination of what I do not know.
A pointless precision beautifully mirroring nothing." - Francesca Berrini
Viveza is pleased to welcome Berrini to Viveza
Gallery and showcase her very large and very small works throughout our Main
Gallery Showroom this month.
Francesca Berrini's Artist Statement:
Since the start of my exploration into mapmaking, I have become increasingly
fascinated by the intersection of manmade and natural forms made visible in maps
and atlases. The combination of the colorful geometry of political divisions
laid over the organic forms of the continents is as incongruous in appearance as
our actual physical interventions in the natural landscape. In looking at a
series of maps of the same area throughout time it is easy to see the fluid
movement of people and their political structures. While human boundaries and
routes of travel shift and vary, features of the landscape seem to remain solid
underneath the flow of humanity. Maps are always only a glimpse of a moment in
history, a self portrait of the time in which they are made. And yet, maps
consistently reflect the influence that humans have had in altering their own
surroundings. Whether calculated in the slow growth of reclaimed land in Japan
or the Netherlands, or in the accidental change of geological features such as
the creation of the Salton Sea or the erasing of coastal marshlands on the gulf
coast, our cumulative effect adds up to astounding changes in our natural
environs. I see my work as a small reflection of this attempt to chart and
control our surroundings. A careful imitation of how the human hand is made
visible on the landscape as viewed by the seemingly all knowing eye of the
mapmaker. In each piece, I attempt to create an illusion of factuality and to
capture a nostalgia for the idea of far away places. Both subtly by the
combination of paper qualities, and overtly by the introduction of images and
text, it is the initial illusion of actual information that makes the eye accept
my distorted combinations at first glance.
All work, artist statements, and biographies can be viewed online at
www.viveza.com.
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2604 Western Ave, Seattle, WA 98121
206.956.3584