Shannon Rankin: New Geographies
Shannon Rankin is an american artist, born in California, which grew up in Vermont. She attended Maine College of Art, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
The artist manipulates the maps, cutting, bending and tearing them apart, in order to make them more similar to the places they represent, investigating the relations between humans and space. She creates new geographies that expose “the connections among geological and biological processes, patterns in nature, geometry and anatomy”, as the artist herself says
Anatomical geographies
One of the artist’s best known series is the anatomy series. Through these works she wants to create a parallelism between the human body and the connections inside it and those present in maps. She can acheive this aim by using various material such as thread and paint.
“Maps depicting mountain ranges, roads, lakes and rivers resemble internal biological features, reproductive anatomy, skeletal structures and networks of the human body. Symbols of cities become acupuncture points, and meridian lines, like rivers, represent an internal system of communication and transport”.
Shannon Rankin
Another interesting artwork that connects maps to the anatomy of the human body is Synapses. The piece consists of a perfect circumference divided into two identical halves, inside which there are a series of intersecting roads and lines. The analogy between the human nervous system and maps is revealed by the title.
An endangered planet
There are many artworks created by the artist that want to reflect on the growing danger to which we are subjecting our ecosystem. A first example is the Compression series, in which the artist decided to cut nautical charts of the Arctic in many angular triangles. She modifies some with graphite and then riassembled them. The end result is a juxtaposition between white and grey triangles that symbolizes the continuous heating of the Arctic ice caps.
Two other works that focus on environmental issues are Plate 1 and Plate 2. They are obtained from the union of many squares cut from oceanic maps, whose information is no longer visible. This is because the artist worked the surface of the maps with graphite and ink to make it opaque, in this way a veil of destruction is spread on the Earth.
Installations
The artist created several installations, of which Falls won the Juror’s Prize at the Maine Contemporary Art Biennial. In all artworks the use of maps is central, very often associated with red pins, similar to geolocation points.
The installation Sights is intended to be a tribute to the maritime tradition of Maine. Starting from the Dymaxion map by Buckminster Fuller the artist created an intertwined geometric and symmetry game enclosed in a large diamond.
References
Featured image: Basin by Shannon Rankin
