Katonah Museum of Art

Maps have been drawn since prehistoric times. Today, with the advent of GPS and Google Maps, they have infiltrated daily life more than ever before. In an era of global culture, artists are increasingly exploring maps as both image and cipher. Mapping: Memory and Motion in Contemporary Art features paintings, works on paper, sculptures, videos, a sound installation, and a live web terminal to address such themes as borders and boundaries, identity and colonialism, journeys—both real and imagined, memory and nostalgia, and tourism and travel.

Encompassing the stars, the land, and the built environment, Mapping explores various strategies that artists use to track their subjects, distilling them into art objects and activities that choreograph location through time and space. Many of the artists incorporate actual maps into their imagery while others emphasize the act of mapping itself. Still others explore new technologies like satellite imaging, the Internet, and specialized computer software.