The map is not the territory.

I love maps because they make me feel omniscient. With a map widespread, I can look directly at Texas and catch Rhode Island out of the corner of my eye.

Maps are designed to be folded. Collapse the Badlands and Minneapolis becomes an outlying suburb of Spokane. I have a friend who grew up in the crease between Boise and Pendleton.

As a six year old, maps held great potential. If I folded the Eastern Seaboard of the United States three times, I could bring my family all back together again. Marblehead, Boston, and Rumson, New Jersey; their major and minor city stars aligned in a perfect constellation. Star upon star upon star, I could hold us all in one tiny hand, or wished it to could be so.

I folded and unfolded maps endlessly, examining my home state of Massachusetts, which was green on blue. Five folds to the left there were other states that were brown and white. I craved and feared these places. Colorado, Montana, Utah. Straight up country. At this young age, my arms were not yet long enough to hold the map completely unfurled, Seattle in my left hand and Boston in my right. Even if I really stretched out, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri landed in my lap, the Gulf of Mexico, a crumpled heap on the floor. At this time in early life, maps were big, really big, much larger than the world I lived in.

Over time that changed, as it does for all of us. As a college student, I woke up one day intending to visit the Hoh Rainforest from my campus in Olympia, for a day trip. Looking at the map, it's just right there, how long could the drive possibly take? It took hours to get back, in the night, afraid on dark roads, running out of fuel and wondering if I would ever see my college, or my family again.

On another undergraduate morning, a friend and I discovered that the Grateful Dead were playing in Oakland, that evening. We hopped in the Volvo and made it to Redding, California before realizing that the show would be long since over before we arrived in the Bay Area. It was as if suddenly everything around me was farther away than I thought. With some sadness, I was forced to accept that the world had become larger than the map. And, thus it remains.

But the map is not the territory, and we, as a society, struggle to reconcile the two. When asking a gas station attendant for some directions to a nearby hotel in the rural west, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I know where that hotel is but I can't tell you how to get there. You'll see a large building on the left, half-way out of town but that's not the one you are looking for." Via negativa: the attempt to arrive at something by defining what it is not.

I would call it Abstract Expressionist information,” says the artist, Paula Scher, "All maps lie, all maps distort. even Google Maps."

This slippage, between understanding where we've been, where we are, and where we're going has become a guiding story for my artwork and it regularly shows up in the paintings. The visual works feature a strong geometry. To me, these lines in the work are not boundaries or delineation, but the subtle crease of a map unfolded, creating just the slightest dissonance between the territory on one side and the other.

My work is a charting or mapping of sites and situations through drawing, painting, sculpture, and sound. The map is not the territory, but the two shape each other in meaningful ways, and the rest is ours to navigate.