In late 2017 Wave Pool hosted two complimentary exhibitions: “Tracing the Ground,” a group show featuring the work of artists who utilize the visual language of maps and the unique iconography of cartography, and “One Line Over the Other,” an exhibition that demonstrates the various manifestations of the grid as a formal tool.

“Tracing the Ground” featured works by artists and collaborators that encompass a wide range of media and approaches:  Environmental scientists using the graphic language of art to map sites of community resources; artists charting the trajectory of their lives using cartographic iconography; and various artistic approaches to planting one’s proverbial flag in the sand—claiming the ground upon which they stand as a basic starting point:  YOU ARE HERE writ large.

As a compliment to the downstairs exhibition, the work of nine current DAAP MFA students, curated by fellow second year MFA candidate Hannah Hersko explored the pervasive phenomena of the grid in our upstairs Locker Room Gallery.  In her 1979 seminal essay, Grids, Rosalind Krauss describes the grid as “an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of an artwork, it is a mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself.”  These boundaries appear as mirrors for our sociopolitical structure as well as the parallels and intersections of human experience; information is plotted and chronologized in an effort to reveal perspective while the very construction of the grid simultaneously gives way to voids and static space.  Though each artist investigates the grid’s manifestation differently, each piece can be understood as a cropped fragment of a much larger, gridded context.