Mimi Gellman
Traveler: recent works
October 1 – 25, 2009
In between Terra Firma and Terra Incognita there is
another place, a place in which we actually dwell. This place has
no name and is part of the geography of the imagination.
This exhibition explores the notion that mapping is a relational, contextual endeavor largely based on one’s personal geography. In considering the many navigational tools and means of orienting oneself, I am charged with a perplexing question. How do we ever know where we really are?
In October of 2008, I had the opportunity to take a seventeen-day excursion across Germany. During that time I was thinking about my identity as a Jewish/Ojibway woman crossing Europe, I kept thinking about the way in which we identify one another, in my case as a woman of a certain age, gender, social class, and indeterminate ethnic origin. With the Traveler series, I wanted to explore what would happen if my visual identity was withheld. I wanted to see if could I affect my sense of exile and also my sense of belonging through assuming the role of a cipher, an embodied being with few identifiable attributes.
In the second series “dreamwalk”, the fluid lines trace the paths of metaphysical walks taken within my imagination on a series of topographical maps. The trails that are left in the wake of the traveler mark a circuitous journey mapped out over time. The locations of the “dreamwalks” can only be hinted at, situated as they are deep within the psyche of the traveler. They resist explanation and point to a paradoxical collision of the real and the imagined.
In the third series “nightdrawing” I continue my exploration of walking, drawing and mapping through the performative action of walkingmy imaginary “dreamwalks”. A number of my original “dreamwalk” drawings were input into a GPS handheld tracker as a “map” and given GPS coordinates, which were then attributed to a specific field near my home. These photos exemplify the marriage of psychogeography and the physical re-tracing of the walk, with their powerful impact resonating from the disorienting orientation of their location and position in space.
