NORWOOD VIVIANO: RE-CAST CITIES

EXCERPT:

“Re-Cast Cities merges urban landscapes with the symbols of industry that have fueled their booms, busts, and builds. A gleaming combustion engine fuses with the bustling metropolis of Detroit. A set of Libbey Hobstar glasses support a hole-punched Toledo skyline. An undulating tree stump contains downtown Portland. A steel I-beam bolsters the golden triangle of Pittsburgh and its forked waterways. Manhattan's imposing, iconic skyline rises out of a stack of newspapers. Norwood Vivian's latest series is a lyrical, surrealist departure from the distilled aesthetic of data visualization that has come to define his oeuvre. It extends his decades-long conceptual project of charting change in cities and populations wrought by industry over time but encodes the works with newfound self-reflexivity. The nebulous boundaries between the objects at the base of the sculptures and maps at their surfaces make the viewer critically aware of the constructed nature of cartographic space, while the story of American industrialization told through each of his chosen cities is also materially embodied by the works, which are themselves made using technologies, processes, and materials born out of those industries.

The cast objects that compose the bases of Vivian's hybrid sculptural maps determine what can be contained by the landscapes at their surfaces. The formal determinism of this convergence process mimetically enacts the production of space as defined by philosopher Henri Lefebvre. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre proposes that ‘the human condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activity and our material surroundings.' Space, fom the built environment to cartography, is actively produced by humans and geographers, and ‘the spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.’ From abstract data to ordered visualization and from object-base to surface-map, Vivian's process is similarly determined by directional decision-making. The supporting elements, from a lead crystal bowl to a French Revival tabletop, set the scope and bounds of the cartographic maps they hold, which are sourced from government LiDAR scans and later 3D-modeled, printed, and cast. In Recasting Houston, for instance, an infnmously sprawling metropolis becomes bound, circumscribed by the glossy, obsidian oil drum that supports it. The energy industry that is represented by the crude oil barrel at the base determines the shape, scope, and population trends of the infrastructure at its surface. And the shape of the map at its surface is determined by data fed by that very industry.”