Maldonado artwork

CORVALLIS, Ore. – “Mapping Hidden Systems,” an exhibit featuring methods for imagining, mapping and making visible systems that people participate in on a daily basis, will be on display on in the Fairbanks Gallery at Oregon State University April 30 through May 23.

An artist’s talk and reception will take place from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 17, during the Corvallis Arts Walk. It is free and open to the public.

The works of Portland-based artists Stephanie Simek and Victor Maldonado, and Boston-based artist and landscape architect Jonah Susskind are featured in the exhibit, which was curated by Taryn Wiens. Wiens is an independent curator, arts writer and artist. Her writing has been published in Daily Serving and Temporary Art Review, and her artwork has been featured in Interview Magazine.

While not traditional cartography, the work in the exhibition communicates information visually, refers to a collectively imagined space and represents scalar relationships. The work can be tools with which to chart position, construct something new as from a blue print or pattern, disrupt a territory or achieve greater agency.

Susskind’s work “Tertiary Territory” takes the form of an immersive suite of images of the interstate system: by overlaying aerial views with a views from the road, he reveals an obscured feedback loop between resource extraction sites and their constituent and reciprocal transportation networks. 

Using a sewing template for a lucha libre mask, Maldonado presents three variations on the mask in surprising scales and materials, disrupting the function and symbology of the mask and re-directing it to a process of grappling or wrestling with themes of identity, gender, social spaces, labor and colonization.

Simek’s sculpture, “XOR, AND, NOR (or how to process all possible outcomes for a+b when a and b equals zero or one)” addresses what the act of processing information looks like in its most distilled form by way of a schematic sculpture of a simple computer.

Fairbanks Gallery is at 220 S.W. 26th St. and is open weekdays from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. the third Thursday of every month. Admission is free.

The exhibition is cosponsored by the Fairbanks Gallery and OSU School of Language, Culture, and Society. Additional support for the exhibition comes from the Oregon Arts Commission.

College of Liberal Arts

About the OSU College of Liberal Arts: The College of Liberal Arts encompasses seven distinct schools, as well as several interdisciplinary initiatives, that focus on humanities, social sciences, and fine and performing arts. Curriculum developed by the college’s nationally and internationally-renowned faculty prepares students to approach the complex problems of the world ethically and thoughtfully, contributing to a student's academic foundation and helping to build real-world skills for a 21st century career and a purposeful life.

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