One-off exhibitions
June 12- July 25, 2026
Installation view, The Map is Not the Territory, One-Off Exhibitions, photo credit: Rich Maciejewski
June 12- July 25, 2026
The Map is Not the Territory features two new works that investigate the way knowledge is transferred.
Doppelgänger investigates how knowledge is conveyed, (mis)translated, and transformed across time, space and technology. A still life tableaux becomes a site where meaning is recognized, then reconstituted. Ideas shift through processes of reproduction and time. A hand-made composition is combined with digital scanning and modeling, the resulting sculpture slides between the original and the copy, the recognized and the unknown. Glass functions as both material and metaphor: reflective and elusive; it is extremely difficult to capture digitally, resulting in distortions and voids in data. Failures become metaphors for breakdowns in understanding that shape contemporary life.
Doppelgänger, 2026, 61” x 35” x 45”, wood, glass, metal, obsidian, polymer-enhanced gypsum, carbon, paint, adhesive, photo credit: Rich Maciejewski
The Map is Not the Territory, 2026, 87” x 114” x 1/2”, glass, metal, adhesive, on view at One-Off Exhibitions in Milwaukee, WI, photo credit: Rich Maciejewski
The Map is Not the Territory serves as an analogy for the volatility of communication and interpretation in our current moment. Instantaneous information appears concise but is often inaccurate or misaligned. Distortions occur whenever knowledge moves between systems. There is space between what is thought and what is disseminated, between experience and memory, between fact and belief. This distortion recurs in the large language models being trained today, whose linguistic biases directly reflect the gendered and racial hierarchies encoded in the vast quantities of texts they consume. The title refers to a phrase coined by Alfred Korzybski in 1931, which states that a representation can never be mistaken for the reality it stands in for.
The genesis of The Map is Not the Territory is Emma Willard's 1845 map, Tree of Time, or History of the United States. Willard, a nineteenth-century educator and cartographer whose innovations in visual pedagogy remain largely unacknowledged, was one of the first American women educated outside the home. She used cartography to illustrate her subjective and aspirational understanding of American history. This map was used as a cornerstone to teach young women how to understand history through the lens of a format reserved for geography, a subject acceptable for young women to study.
The process of making The Map is Not the Territory reiterates the concept: color is combined arbitrarily; sagging and melting text frustrates legibility. There is a parallel between Emma Willard's age of print and our digital age. Color bleeds, edges shift, and what was once precise becomes approximate.
Detail, The Map is Not the Territory, photo credit: Rich Maciejewski
