Terminal 1 Gate 10, Departures

Latitude 33° 56' focuses on the works of eight artists who use maps or mapping techniques to translate their unique experiences of place. From geographical to psychological explorations, their artworks encompass multiple subjects, viewpoints, distances, and time sequences. The title of the exhibition refers to LAX’s latitude in DMS format (degrees, minutes and seconds), and plays with notions of location and territorial representation.

Renée Petropoulos’s two-part maps, inspired by conversations with people who have experienced a change in their country’s name and/or borders during their lifetimes, evoke ideas of memory and national identity. Fran Siegel’s collages piece together multiple perspectives, mapping the visual tension between Los Angeles’ sprawling urban developments and its surrounding natural landscape. Flora Kao’s paintings overlay hundreds of Los Angeles street-grid maps on tarpaper, alluding to the sprawling, petroleum-driven nature of our metropolis. Peter Bo Rappmund’s stop-motion animation contains thousands of still photographs taken along the 800 miles of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, contrasting the conduit’s linearity with the natural landscape. Stephen Berens’s photographs layer images of 1860s Civil War battlegrounds with 1960s counter-culture gathering spots in America, rendering their revolutionary histories both visible and invisible. Mark Lewis’s video, composed of tens of thousands of one- to two- second shots taken with his cellphone over the course of several years, charts Los Angeles’ distinct neighborhoods from east to west. Lynne Berman’s layered text drawings record complaints that she solicited from passersby during public performances in different cities around the world. Mark Steven Greenfield’s energetic, patterned drawings are mental maps of his creative process of combining transcendental meditation with the Surrealist practice of “automatic writing.”

Anchored in geographical information and subjective cartographies, Latitude 33° 56' offers innovative ways for mapping and perceiving the external world and the self.