The Claremont Museum of Art exhibition Displacement Zero presents work by Claremont born, London based conceptual artist Andrew M. Wenrick. Maps of the Los Angeles area and beyond have been reconstructed into unexpected configurations, challenging our perception of place.
The exhibition, on view May 10 through August 25, 2019 at the Museum located in the historic Claremont Depot at 200 W. First Street, is generously sponsored by Sandy Baldonado, Susan Guntner, Catherine McIntosh, and Elaine Turner.
The public is invited to the Art Walk opening reception on Saturday, June 1 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. The museum is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 4:00 p.m.
In his work, Andrew Wenrick deconstructs geography, in this case the United States, and then reconstructs and restructures fragments into new realities. As he points out, the single most important identifying quality of geography is shape. When familiar boundaries are altered, ambiguity results, a blurring of the relationships that allow us to locate and ground ourselves. The result is deliberate ambiguity and, for the viewer, thought-provoking perceptual shifts.
Since the industrial revolution, and particularly in our age of sophisticated communications technology, the world has come to feel not only smaller but also seamless. Photographs of earth from space reinforce this truth, as the imagined hard outlines around cities, states, and countries become less distinct in our minds. We are global citizen, an abstract concept but one that we can now better visualize, and that, one hopes, will lead us to strive toward collective goals.
In practice, Wenrick’s acrylic and paper constructions involve, cutting, layering, and reshaping familiar map images, place names, and symbols into unexpected configurations. Accepted geographical “truths,” both physical and experiential, are questioned as the seen and the unseen are laid out before us, challenging our preconceptions about place and opening our minds to untapped potential.
