Online Catalog
Welcome to My World
December 2 – 31, 2011
About Welcome To My World
A stellar list of area artists were invited to consider a similar, unusual, three-dimensional object as canvas—a vintage world globe. This invitational exhibition was conceived and co-curated by new-to-Portland artist, Robert Tomlinson and is co-curated and hosted by 23 Sandy Gallery. The artists were asked to transform, build, infuse, reduce or reinvent the globe using the expressive power of cartography, exploring the form of the globe to create a compelling new work of art.
Several of the artists focused on global politics and world affairs. Global warming was tackled by Jim Neidhardt with a resin coated glove that seems to be melting. Kerry Davis used his globe, titled Under the Wire,“to represent the damaging grip of the military, industrial and corporate paradigm that has encircled and enclosed our planet and the recognition that we have little time left to challenge and change the plight of our planet Earth.” Allison Bruns painted her globe with infamous dictators to remind us that “nothing causes greater change in the world than the slaughter of a population.”
Two of the artists transformed their globes into kinetic, electrified, sculptural objects that focus on the interior of the globe instead of the exterior. Anna and Leo Daedalus collaborated with Samuel Miller to create a you’ve-got-to-see-it-to-believe-it globe that features a second globe nested inside a larger globe that is viewed through magnified door peepholes. Peer inside at a moving interior featuring 300 found photos and postcard images from the latitude locations of the peephole itself. Susan Collard’s globe is also electrified. Viewed through equatorial slots, a spaceship-like sculptural interior “hints at an otherworldly passage: Aeneas or Orpheus journeying to the land of the dead, perhaps, but also that classic science fiction moment where characters discover their lives are bounded by a manufactured world.”
Artists were also welcome to view their world as flat instead of spherical. Cynthia Newalinski’s cut and burned maps create a new topography while Chandra Cerritio’s Global Reading: The World on the NY Times Front Page, August 2011 is an attempt to make more tangible the far-off places she encounters everyday when reading the newspaper. For the month of August, the artist noted the countries in the front-page stories of the New York Times every day. At the end of the month, she tabulated the number of times each of these countries was featured and translated that onto a felt wall hanging that shows how our view of the world is greatly shaped by current events
Top of page image credits, left to right: © Allison Bruns, Kerry Davis, David Meeker