The same place three times

Gerhard Marx
The same place three times, 2021
Reconfigured map fragments on canvas 
Work: 50 x 60 cm

The same space three times forms part of a series of sculptural and propositional cartographies that engages physical depictions of space - ‘spatial imaginaries’ – with an interest in how these descriptions affect and shape that which it describes. The sculpture describes the most basic of architectural forms – four walls circumscribing and empty space; an enclosure of sorts. One long side of this enclosure is shared with another similar form, which in turn shares its other long side with another. The result is a form that reads as either three interlocking structures, or as three overlapping views of the same structure. It is a form that describes a coalescence of viewpoints, an unfolding, a re-reading, an object that presents itself through a multiplicity of viewpoints. The conventional ‘globe’ offers a simplified world view in which the world is presented as a singular, cohesive, and contained entity, one in which all parts are contained by the whole. In contrast with this simpification, the sculptural cartographies of this series uses the logic of collage with the aim of comprehending more complicated spacial experiences of overlap, intersection, simultaneity, relationality and overlay. The act of laminating paper cartographies onto three dimensional form mimics the construction method of conventional globes. Curiously this act reverses one of the central concerns of cartography - the logic of projection - which transposes the continuously curved surface of the obloid earth-body onto a flat, two dimensional plane in order to make complex, dimensional information flat, manageable, portable, and inscribable. The act of transposing flat cartographies into dimensional space inverses that process: it is a moment of bringing the theoretical into the real; into dimensionality. It marks the opposite of ‘projection’ – arguably an act of ‘reflection’. The result is an object that is both drawing and sculpture, both object and conjecture. The cartographies used to coat The same space three times are collated from standard, educational world atlasses. The fragmentation and reconstruction of these cartographic shards pays no heed to histories, boundaries, geographies nationalities and points of origin. The logic of collage allows these dissonant fragments to be combined into a new subjective logic, suggesting a spatial imaginary which aspires to hold multiple positionalities, doubled presences, failed containments, lapsed distances, histories folded into one another, interwoven geographies, worlds that exist across, in between and amongst. Gerhard Marx 2021