Paula Scher

”These are absolutely, one hundred percent inaccurate,” Paula Scher declares of her colossal map paintings. Then, after a pause: “But not on purpose.” Another pause: they’re actually ”sort of right.” And therein lies their bracing paradox. Scher’s sites—Manhattan, Israel, and India among them—are instantly recognizable. Scanning the allover expanse of the canvases, you might easily pick out the swath of Central Park, the void of the Dead Sea, the dot of Mumbai. But they are also highly interpretive. The colors and graphic styles allude to loose, mostly media-fed impressions. This buzz might well distract from the fact that Scher’s source images are bona fide maps, which she copies with easygoing care—a glance at the map, a stroke of the brush, and so on (there’s no grid transfer here). But just like a tourist who takes a wrong turn despite an alternating glance at the map and step of the foot, Scher sometimes gets lost, misspelling a city’s name, shifting a border, diverting a river. And when that happens, she gladly lets the lapse go. "History is rife with human error, not to mention shifting borders, and after all, the source map is already a fiction." - Jennifer Liese

To see more of this work go to her website.