Off the Map: Cartographies in Transit

Guest Curator Ellen Moffat explores getting lost as a speculative and incomplete survey of navigational strategies that all of us use and have never really acknowledged.

Additional Information

Uta Riccius, The Armchair Traveller in the streets of Mexico City, 2000, (installation) paper map of North America, invisible thread, wood

Guest Curator Ellen Moffat explores getting lost as a respectable way to explore both new or familiar territory. As an attitude and process, it provides a series of unpredictable encounters and experiences in-between departure and arrival. This exhibition is a speculative and incomplete survey of navigational strategies and proposals based on invisible locators that all of us use, or have used, and have never really acknowledged. They might be as casual as maps sketched onto a matchbook, or looking for a site with only a vague thread of direction, but finding it anyway, by a strange directional confidence/certainty. Slipping past the traditional navigational toolbox (maps, orienteering, geomatics), this project seeks to identify familiar yet uncharted walkways, biways, homing systems, highways and paths. Tracing, tracking and trailing form an integral component of the works, as does invention, fabrication, renaming and altered states of consciousness. Part of the project will take place beyond the gallery with off-site installations and performances. A limited-edition travel brochure will accompany the exhibition. Artists in the exhibition are Cindy Baker (Saskatoon), Judy Bowyer (Saskatoon), Felipe Diaz (Regina), Suzanne Evans (Wakefield), Charlie Fox (Regina), Hamish Fulton (Canterbury, Kent), Jen Hamilton (Regina)/Jen Southern (London, England), Will Kwan (New York), Uta Riccius (Ottawa), and Gary Varro (Regina).