Maps&Legends responds to our cultural compulsion to preserve objects whether or not we understand their histories. Using tiled markers installed in the early 1900s in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood as a starting place, the gallery becomes a sonic deep map that offers participants the opportunity to navigate aural and visual topographies of the neighborhood.

“This work is borne of footsteps, maps, and a specific kind of time travel that allows one full access to the stories in each square meter of a landscape. When I began this project over two years ago, I was engaged with a density of layers (geology, biology, industry, mythology, meteorology, and others) in my neighborhood in Ballard.

“The word location comes directly from the Latin root, locatio, or ‘a placing.’ Though our culture has a compulsion to displace our mortality onto historically significant objects, perhaps more importantly, we also place our lives onto a personally relevant landscape. Beginning with the mosaic tile markers found on street corners all over Ballard, this active verb has become the avenue to a complexity of histories.”

“Kupczak’s work mimics the process of how we construct meaning out of our impressions of a place. The stepped layers and undulating forms of the map, along with the ebb and flow of sound from the different speakers, gently suggest the idea of a journey.”
-Gayle Clemans, Seattle Times

 

 

Artists