Lay of the Land depicts individual geographical spaces in mixed media drawings and a site-specific wall drawing. Constructed from paper, ink, acrylic, pins, and other materials, this work continues Caswell’s exploration of mental maps and the mind’s peculiar ways of organizing memories. Using a pared-down, coded language through which points, lines and fields of color define spaces and retell narratives, the work arises out of a desire to capture experience, an impulse to locate, arrange and secure the past and the present.

Lay of the Land introduces some new ideas and references to Caswell’s work, including generative art and satellite imagery. In the site-specific wall drawing, Vegas Baby, based on a convention of progressive bloggers that the artist attended this year, Caswell combines the geography of the city with the interconnected cyber-world of a large and active online community. Different types of data are used to create a multidimensional schematic: shapes based on casino buildings as seen on Google Earth, lines composed of ink and pins which mark the movements of convention participants over the course of the 4-day event, and overlapping translucent circles which represent online connections among bloggers as determined using available data from the blog DailyKos.