Alina Grasmann “Paper Town”

New York Art Residency & Studios Foundation (NARS)

This event has ended.

In the Project Space, NARS presents Paper Town, an exhibition of a new work by recent residency artist Alina Grasmann. The artists first New York City solo exhibition is a series of paintings of houses and other buildings in the fictional town of Agloe, NY. Agloe does not exist, except that it has and it does.

Agloe was first created as a “paper town” or “copyright trap” in the 1930s by Otto G. Lindberg, director of the General Drafting Co., and his assistant, Ernest Alpers. They named the fictional town in their road map of New York state after their initials, in essence signing it and protecting it from copyright infringement. Years later the publisher Rand McNally issued its map featuring Agloe, NY, but by then its originators could no longer claim theft as their fake town had led to the establishment and naming of the Agloe General Store — an instance of the map preceding the territory. In 2014, after the New York Times inquired about its provenance, Google wiped Agloe off its map. But that hasn’t stopped countless pilgrimages to or in search of Agloe, spurred on by “Paper Town” a novel by John Green, where now a fake, albeit real, historical landmark sign welcomes visitors.

Having read about the “paper town” in German newspapers, the artist visited Agloe in September 2017. Snapshots she took of homes, churches, gas stations and other buildings leading to the historical marker serve as the basis of some 40 oil on paper paintings, a selection of which is on view in the gallery. In these paintings, the fictional town is real. In their reliable precision and ostensible truth, the paintings stand in as objective documents, no less reliable than a map, for Agloe’s existence. But devoid of inhabitants or signs of activity, something feels off center, strange, and uncanny. The suggestiveness of her vivid images is an appeal to distrust their very representational character. More