Amy Schissel

Lives and works in Miami, FL

Artist statement

Increasingly as we go about our 21st Century lives, we try to bridge the gap between spaces we see and navigate in both the physical and online worlds. Given augmented reality, every physical, geographical space is ‘interpenetrated’ with information, so all physical spaces are now also informational spaces. My works meld notational systems of traditional cartography and internet mapping to explore new dimensions of our contemporary landscape. I examine specifically how physical ‘location’, set against the ability to be everywhere at once via net-space, presents contradictions of identity in geo-political relationships: interpretations of personal and collective history are reshaped by the onset of digital information technology, offsetting our traditional sense of civic legibility. While addressing the progressively dematerialized quality of our data driven culture, the merging of traditional and cyber mapping systems seeks out new social cartographies and presents fantastical meta-narratives of worlds colliding in large scale paintings and installations. Inevitably a hybrid visual language emphasizing junctures where physical, ‘factual’ cartography melds with effervescent, ‘informational’ traffic is embodied within the time-honored strategies of painting and drawing. In my recent work, the painting and drawing process acts to record physical and imaginary journeys of the contemporary body through the simultaneous spaces of the physical and cyber, marking out ‘new world’...

Artwork