Currently up at the University of Georgia, Rachel Clarke’s Terra Incognita video provides a zen enticement into the gallery space at the Lamar Dodd School of Art as part of her show Unmapping . The video projects quite large on the far wall in front of a bench, and loops between a white unmapping and black mapping of sorts.

Terra Incognita from Rachel Clarke on Vimeo.

I heard the artist speak about the process of making this work, starting with real maps–American road maps–and digitizing them. Scanning their parts and lines into different parts in Photoshop, Clarke then animated their movement in a deconstructive process that then reverses in the second half of the film. The journey alluded to by maps becomes a transformed journey of movement through the layered lines and marks of maps. For Clarke what was equally important was the traces of the original map and scanning process in the final film, marks of the artist’s hand and materiality that ostensibly are lost in the digital medium.

[Note: I wish I knew why the video is displaying on the far left. Embedding videos in self-hosted WordPress, anyone?]