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Artist Nina Katchadourian works in multiple mediums including sculpture, paint, photography, video, and collage but maintains a strong thematic concept throughout her collections. Each seems to study the relationship between the natural world and the human interpretation of it. She examines the way in which we as people, for lack of a better world, anthropomorphize the enviroment around us. How we insert our own human interpretations to create order out of a world that at first seems chaotic. The works seems to be saying to the viewer, “See! See! There is a pattern here, it is just not a human based one!”

Of her body of work entitled World Map, Katchadourian states:

I made this map in college in response to an assignment, and it marks the beginning of my work with maps. Using a blade, I took apart a paper map, moving pieces over to a large piece of paper which I watercolored the same blue as the ocean in the original map. Gradually, the world was reconfigured. I often reconstructed words using presstype in places where the names of countries had gotten truncated. There were switches based on historical or geopological factors (Western Europe inserted into West Africa); others were based on formal correspondences or quirks of the map itself. Australia and Alaska had the same green border color, for example, and fit perfectly together due to the distortion of scale that occurs towards the poles.

Nina Katchadourian was introduced to me via Katherine Dexter’s Blog