Christopher Henry Gallery is pleased to announce The Map as Art, a group show curated by Katharine Harmon and Christopher Henry. The exhibition presents a diverse group of work in a variety of media, all of which use mapping concepts to explore uncharted territories both formal and intellectual. The show is presented concurrent with the launch of Harmon’s book, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (Princeton Architectural Press).

In the guise of offering illumination, maps obscure. They purport to bring order to the fundamental chaos of life, promising clarity in the face of flux, and claiming knowledge of the unknowable. In their quest to demarcate our differences, they comfort us even as they give the lie to the notion of common experience.

No wonder, then, that cartographic practice poses such a seductive figure to the artist, that map-maker of the soul. Here is a ready-made syntax with which to explore the unknown, an idiom with which to communicate the nature of what we find at the borders of our experiences. As artists chart new provinces and reinterpret familiar ones, the map becomes a compelling means of discovery, upending cartographic rules to make way for all that is and could be.

The exhibition features work by Doug Beube, Matthew Cusick, Joshua Dorman, Jerry Gretzinger, Ingo Gunther, Jane Hammond, Emma Johnson, Karey Kessler, Joyce Kozloff, Hayato Matsushita, Meridith McNeal, Florent Morellet, Vik Muniz, Aga Ousseinov, Matthew Picton, Karin Schaefer, Dannielle Tegeder, Heidi Whitman, and Jeff Woodbury.