meg scheminske
"Wish You Were Here," an interactive project presented in conjunction with ConfluxCity 2009, compares simple, abstract representations of particular places (Google map paintings) with the personal and temporal experience of being present in them.
For this project, I created six 12" x 12" paintings on canvas depicting compositions culled from Google maps (below). Each "location" lies somewhere within the five boroughs of New York City (click a painting to see its Google map location*). The sites/compositions for the paintings were chosen solely on the basis of their abstract aesthetics (i.e. I chose sites/compositions that appeal to me on a formal level, not because I know anything about the actual locations).
On September 20th, 2009, I invited New York City residents to journey to one or all of these locations and document or respond to what they found there. The results were sent to me in Portland, OR (see them here) and will be displayed alongside the paintings at The Vestibule gallery in May 2010.
For more information on creative maps and psychogeography, check out the "Links" tab on the left.
*UPDATE: While the paintings pretty precisely matched the linked map crops back in September 2009, Google maps underwent a makeover in October 2009 (one of many, ongoing makeovers, I'm sure) which rendered the paintings inexact. They now exist as documents of a certain (pre-10/2009) Google maps aesthetic, which I think is kinda neat.
