“Many roots of this body of work exist in photos I’ve taken while traveling back home to New York and meanderings in the Utah desert,” said artist Jane Christensen. These photos then started to shift, breaking the boundary of the frame, and turning into collages, paintings, and in some cases sculptures. Christensen calls the work “byproducts” or “samples” that “jump further from a depictive flat image” and continuously return to the grid as a structure.
Here, the grid offers what Rosalind Krauss calls, a mythic power in that “it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”
Mapping It Out is a deep exploration of process—both of the material and the psychological, both science and illusion. When seen as a whole, the collective body of work is the creation of a literal, psychological, and metaphorical space that is constantly evolving and is an effort to map the unsteady, at times unseen, but deeply felt, continuous shifting territories, self, and place.