MAPS & GLOBES
"Knowing where I am in relation to other things has always been fascinating to me. I suppose I’ve been blessed with an innate sense of direction, and a curiosity to know my place, which led to an early love of cartography. I first started making maps after an unsuccessful search for a world map large enough to fit my living room and my aesthetic; it then occurred to me that I could make my own.
While in the process of doing this, I thought of how through the ages maps have had political slants. European maps had a tendency to make Greenland much larger than it really was, and Africa much smaller, simply so Europe would appear prominently in the center. Maps that appeared in US classrooms severed a crack right through Russia and West Asia, just so North America would also appear at the forefront. In recent years I have been taking those political motivations for how maps have been drawn, and playing with them...turning them on their head, and using the visual language of cartography as a means to make other social commentary."
Top to bottom: Doesn't Matter Globe; Planet Water; This Way Up; Map Of Land And Sea; America First
THE STORIES WE TELL, THE STORIES WE ARE TOLD
"Consumed by the vast unknowableness of both outer space and the oceans on our planet, I think of the connectedness between everything and how we see patterns where we choose to look. When looking at the night sky and trying to recognize constellations, I try to picture the first people to draw those imaginary lines between the random pinpricks of light, making sense out of chaos.
Then I wonder, if those lines connecting the dots across the cosmos were real, what they would look like from elsewhere in the universe. There is so much we do not know, and the emptiness of that is as potentially terrifying as the open ocean on a moonless night. But in spite of the futility of it all, we try to enjoy the incredible unlikeliness of our being here at all. We still try to figure things out. To imagine. To find meaning. In his book Sapiens, Noah Yuval Harari writes that "the greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance." My dad raised me to believe that the surest sign of intelligence in another human being is curiosity and imagination."
Top to Bottom: The Stories We Are Told; Lost At Space; For All We Know; Constellation Road Map; All The Things You Don't Believe
MEASURING LAND AND SEA
Measuring Land and Sea is an investigation of the philosophical impasse at which art and science often find themselves. One is by nature subjective, while the other is defined by the pursuit of objectivity. Yet, both express two very human characteristics — feeling and reasoning.
This series combines classical landscape and seascape painting with systems of technical measurement, presenting the viewer with both artistic and scientific modes of representation. Rather than increase our understanding of the work, this combination makes things less clear by providing superfluous distraction while simultaneously highlighting the boundaries of perceived knowledge.
Top to bottom: Coastal Fathom Painting; Fathom Seascape No.11; Measuring Land And Sea; Protracted landscape No.8; Protracted Landscape No.9
https://www.oliverjeffers.com/
