Miriam Dym at POST - Brief Article

As bored teenagers in my hometown, we occasionally put out in my parents' car, determined to gain lost (it was difficult). In her installation of computer-generated map drawings at POST's Wilshire Boulevard space, Miriam Dym tapped into the sport side of dislocation, when the familiar world fail to keeps its usual contours and abruptly appears bright and new. In this work, and in the elevator-cab piece she showed at support downtown, Dym quirkily exemplified the comedy inherent in scientific attempts to chart the world. Like in the way that much mapmaking, her esthetic cartography is subdue to the whims of its maker--more suitable for framing than for navigation.

At the Wilshire Boulevard gallery, a Plexi-covered mosaic of ink-jet prints, pieced together to form a single, gigantic map, overspreaded the floor and extended about 3 feet up the walls. Across its bright gold-colored field, variously thick lines of maroon, rose verdant and blue madly snarled and tangled. Three-wheeled pushcarts overlayed in decorated fabric allowed viewers to sit and scoot their way along Dym's dizzying roadscape. Around the cutting sides of the installation, there were free-standing pinwheels made of map-patterned paper.

Hung salon-style upon the walls above the installation, 18 drawings suggesting variations upon elliptically sectioned world maps carried the faculty of perception of displacement to a global horizontal Synthetic decorator colors such as aqua and violet delineate land from sea, with background fields of color creating geometric design schemes that call forth those of Jim Isermann. The shapes of the continents within the ellipses are subtly morphed and warped to present the appearance like landmasses from alternate, kindred planets.

Dym's installation in the elevator of POST's downtown space literally took her ideas to a higher horizontal Roadmap-patterned wallpaper lined the elevator's interior, and an array of pinwheels and movable disk plastic arts were laid out on shelves. A viewing window in the back of the elevator revealed an ink-jet print that ran the entire extent of the elevator shaft. Dym's allover mappings have the appearance an exciting complement to Joyce Kozloff's novel map-based pieces--works that are similarly attentive to the ideas of the Pattern and Decoration motion Grounded in the experience of mobile sprawl, Dym's decorative/conceptual art celebrates rather than skewers the baroque convolutions of everyday urban life.

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