Take California (or A New and Correct Map of America)

Mikhael Subotzky
Take California (or A New and Correct Map of America), 1752 - 2021
Ink, acrylic, and white-out tape on canvas
Work: 200 x 172.6 cm

Take California (or A New and Correct Map of America) is based on a 1752 map of the Americas from the Stanford Library collection in which California is drawn as an island. This error was repeated for over a hundred years as mapmakers copied one another — the thirst for tokens of “discovery” in bourgeois 18th-century Europe quickly outgrowing the resources to accurately render the conquered lands. As with previous map works, Subotzky starts by turning the source “upside-down” and erasing the colonial names, a futile attempt to defamiliarize synthetic hierarchies of cartographic relations. He then alternates between scrubbing away ink and adding paint, the disorder of his hand fighting against the control exerted by the map’s epistemological assertion that it represents the world in two dimensions. Subotzky paints his way into the dimensional gap between the flattened landscape and the historical narratives that are there undrawn, picturing the flows of tides, weather, resources and humans. He notes; “As I paint I wonder what a real “new and correct” map might look like, one that unhides the memories that bleed through the porous cartographic outlines. One day my brush dropped, mid-Atlantic, as I realized with shock that I was painting the Middle Passage. In focusing on the self-repeating erroneous ‘island’ of California as an emblem of colonial failure, I had quite literally brushed over the oceans of unimaginable violence and trauma that stood between my home in Johannesburg and that made-up, misrepresented place. It reminded me of the disembodied bubble of the many flights that I have taken across the Atlantic, the blinking cartoon plane on the screen bridging the ocean in my sleep as if it really was just a blue strip on the map.”