NYAB Event - Ted Lawson “The Map is Not the Territory”

Ted Lawson “The Map is Not the Territory”

Joseph Gross Gallery

This event has ended.

Joseph Gross Gallery presents its inaugural exhibition, The Map is Not the Territory, featuring various sculpture and new media works by Brooklyn based artist, Ted Lawson.

For the occasion of his first solo show at Joseph Gross Gallery, Lawson will début a new series of work consisting of three dimensional wall mounted pieces and freestanding sculptures milled from MDF (a wood fiber based material commonly used in commercial fabrication), brass plate etchings, and three large scale drawings rendered in the artist’s own blood fed intravenously to a CNC (computer numerical control) machine using computer technology akin to a 3D printer.

In the show’s title, The Map is Not the Territory, Lawson references a quote by the 20th century Polish philosopher and scientist, Alfred Korzybski, who pioneered the theory of general semantics that explained human experience as limited by biology and language. This concept serves as a unifying theme to the work in The Map is Not the Territory, which draws imagery from sources ranging from the Hubble telescope (Carina Nebula and Moon) and Renaissance cartography (Orbis Descriptio, produced in collaboration with Shelter Serra) to self-portraiture (Ghost in the Machine), in an overall exploration of the philosopher’s dictum that the abstract representation of something, and our reaction to it, is not the thing itself.

The nature of Lawson’s practice pushes the boundaries between realism and abstraction, producing works with the polish of high-end manufacturing, but with the allowance for chance operations through the machine’s algorithmic autonomy; telltale reminders of the ‘hand’ of the artist. Combining computer programming with fine art, industrial-scale production techniques akin to Koons’s or Murakami’s studio practices, Lawson writes the thousands of lines of code that direct the robotic arm of the CNC machine doing the drawing and carving of his works, resulting in symbiotic spectacles that might be interpreted as both commodities and concepts.

These man and machine ‘collaborations’ are most poignant in Lawson’s blood drawings. Documented in a short video capturing the artist literally spilling blood for his work, fed to the machine through an IV over hours at a time, the act ultimately challenges the preconception that an artist whose practice utilizes computers and coding is somehow more removed from his work than an artist using graphite or paint.

Employing the philosophy of Korzybski, Lawson is able to mount a nuanced exploration of human experience in the physical world, and the role art and technology play in our classification and understanding of it. Drawing examples from the earliest Western explorers’ attempts to map the global sphere with his 3D rendering of a 1511 world map, to physical reproductions of photographic images taken light-years away through modern-day space exploration, Lawson weaves together the narratives and symbols that create an abstraction of reality that we call human consciousness.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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