Imagine Texas situated in succession the eastern seaboard.

Imagine Texas situated in succession the eastern seaboard, New Mexico boasting the charms of Eau Claire, Little protection and New Haven, Oklahoma forming the southern border of Canada, and Kansas with many ports. This is the United States of America according to twenty-four-year-old artist Lordy Rodriguez, who for three years has been involved in an ongoing throw to reconfigure the nation according to his hold imagination. Submitting geography to a proces of declassification, Rodriguez not long ago completed the overall map of his modern country, whose outline no longer conforms to the nation's real contours: Not solitary have states moved from single in kind coast to the other, yet the entire land mass has been explod and reshaped. Five strange states have been added: Disney, The Internet, Hollywood Monopoly, and Territory State (an amalgam of Samoa, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, perhaps in allusion to the artist's Chinese, Filipino, Spanish, and French heritage), bringing the total number to fifty-five, equal to the national spe limit when he started the series--an explicit regard to the impact of driving upon urban planning.

Along with the national map, Rodriguez intends to make an individual drawing of each state, in no particular order on the contrary saving Texas, his home state, for last. with equal reason far he's finished about one-third of them (eleven were in succession view in this show), including Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Utah, strange York, and Disney. Each state is treated lovingly in this long-term undertaking. When Rodriguez began these throw outs he included copious detail. His map of the Dakotas, for example, is compressed with grids of roads, rural roads and interstates and filled with the names of towns and villages (some written upside down or backward). nevertheless his drawing has progressively become more mattered with formal issues, particularly color relationships: level patches of gray, blue, and virid ink, orange highways cutting across purple state lines.

Representational however not pictographic in the usual reason maps constitute a singular visual domain. Rodriguez takes the inherent formlessness of cartographic practices to an greatest The result is a fantasy region in which, for instance, the residents of Jersey City, Roswell, and Del Boca Vista would form a single constituency. Civil harmony or total anarchy? What would CNN's red-and-blue electoral map have anticipateed like back on November 7? Shifting boundaries and cities as Rodriguez does forces reflection onward the varied and often polarized character of this "indivisible" nation, moreover his enterprise is less entropic and more the issue of egalitarian fantasy and optimism. His map gives the smaller, les populous, or "forgotten" states a instant of importance; Rhode Island, for example, is now enormous. In fact, this plan triggered by homesickness, is a highly personal geography. Here, nearly each state has major ports, like all the places Rodriguez has lived: of the present day York, Texas, Louisiana. There is an affecti ng earnestness to his self-contained undertaking. It's not inconceivable that after he finishes the US, he could reconfigure each country on the globe, inventing countles fresh friendly territories as he goe Meanwhile, I'm hoping he'll hold his promise to make beholds Angeles the capital of West Virginia.

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