Rebecca Riley: Maps as dynamic systems

Rebecca Riley is an American artist that was born in Colorado. Her origins have made her develop a strong bond with nature and its beauties. As she says, this esteem for the natural world is the base of her pieces of art. She has a BA from Carleton College, a liberal art college in Northfield, and an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York. The artist now lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens, both as an artist and as an elementary school art teacher.

Maps

The artist believes that maps are reflections of the alteration made by the population of the world on cities, regions and countries. The aim of Rebecca Riley’s work is to reveal the pattern that lays underneath a society and its relationships by reinterpreting existing maps with rich acrylic colours.

She manipulate maps with the help of acrylic paint to expose geopolitical, socio-economic and environmental relationships between and within countries. In fact she wants to emphasize these relationships by really peculiar connections, creating visual patterns on charts.

Cities

The series “75 Mile Radius” represents a series of American cities and is made by painting on existing maps. The artist’s paintings provide a certain parallelism between urban places and living systems, since the dynamics of cities often remind us of the internal functioning of a body such as the movement of blood in the veins and arteries.

“I have come to see each city as a kind of living organism, its growth directed, misdirected, and sometimes out of the control of its human inhabitants.“

Rebecca Riley

Installations

Rebecca Riley is a multifaceted artist, she not only works with paintings and drawings, but she also experiments in create installations. One of her last installation at first sight might seem a series of bluish and greenish rocks on a wall, but it isn’t the case.

We can see that with a closer look evident that they are actually small fragments of maps embedded in frames to make them look like small lichens and stones. The idea behind it is that dynamic relationships within realities develop and envelop themselves as mosses.

Randomland

Form the artist point of view in the modern world the physical location becomes almost irrelevant, because of the increasingly use of instant cyber localization and communication. Randomland wants to represent this state of being, in fact it is made from bits of juxtaposed random cartographic sources. Her work was on exhibit in the Prow Art Space at the Flatiron Building

Fracked World

Earth appears to have limited natural reserves. It follows that higher consumption levels will deplete the Earth’s riches. The implication is obvious, infinite growth is impossible due to these constraints on physical resources. Fracked World represents humanity endless hunt for resources by using old pieces of maps stacked on top of one another creating compositions similar to small pyramids. Her work was on exhibit in the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich.

References:

Artist’s website

Artist’s instagram

artobserver.com

Identity: Artist Research-

Lorraineglessener.blogspot.com

Featured image: Flower River, acrylic with fabric and maps on panel / 24″ x 30″ / 2015