Aleksandra Mir
Tierra del Fuego, 2006
Aleksandra Mir
Tierra del Fuego , 2006
Marker on paper
135 x 140 cm
Aleksandra Mir’s map drawings are part of series made by the artist using Sharpie marker pen and flipchart paper. Reproducing details of found maps, the works often draw attention to particular features that would be lost in the overview—corporate parks and nearly empty spaces. These are drawings of the maps themselves, rather than the places they represent, and Mir also turns her eye to the cartographic symbols, and the flourishes of style in text and image that individuate each map from being pure information but are also indicative of their time’s perspective. In this there is a sense of lost scale and time, with the series produced to fill studio moments between Mir’s projects that have seen her convert a beach into a lunar landscape for First Woman on the Moon, a collaboration with Fashion designer Jeremy Scott, to projects that engage directly with the public through drawing. In these approaches, Mir takes a broad landscape in which art can be an actor beyond simply making and showing, a democratizing intent.