Photo: Rich Sanders, courtesy Des Moines Art Center
Topography is the creation of a visual map that describes the natural or human-made features of a place. Humans have long used the process of mapmaking to make sense of the world around us. Mapping can create order out of vast amounts of information, help us to extrapolate broader patterns, or reveal how unseen systems influence our perceptions. The artists in this exhibition have coopted this practice to their own ends. Some seek to record the impact of humans on our surroundings, documenting the changes wrought upon the natural landscape by ongoing industrialization and suburban sprawl. Others use mapmaking as a starting point for abstract artistic experimentation, transforming cartographic information into meditations on shape and color. In Topographies, mapping serves as a metaphor for the ways artists draw meaning from their surroundings: how they transform our understanding of both the physical world and the societal forces that shape the places we inhabit.
Andy Goldsworthy's Prairie Cairn/ For My Father/ Grinnell, Iowa, 2001-2002 will be on view in the exhibition. The work comprises of a suite of fifteen Cibachrome prints documenting an ephemeral component of the artist’s Three Cairns project (2002), for which he constructed companion permanent sculptures on the grounds of the Des Moines Art Center. Goldsworthy’s cairns are made through dry-point masonry, in which no mortar is used; instead, the stones are precisely fitted together, relying on weight and friction for their stability. Goldsworthy photographed Prairie Cairn over eighteen months: with varying heights of grass, in snow, and while the area was subjected to a controlled maintenance burn.
Learn more at desmoinesartcenter.org.
