A Dot and A Line

Official maps and photographs have served rulers well by colonizing our imagination of land and identity. The power of these imposed boundaries relies on our collective forgetfulness that there are other ways of seeing and being. The project A Dot and A Line by Artist Gaye Chan, draws our attention to the very process of border making. "Cartography and photography are two major forms of representing reality in the modern age. The modern cartographer maps land and sea from ‘god’s’ eye view, at once naturalizing and prioritizing seeing from a distance. The photographer with his monocular vision, inverting one-point perspective, stands at its vanishing point. " view Installation

'In the center of the room, housed in display cases, lay the same number of pieces of paper as paired photographs on the wall. On each paper a map - here a town, there a road. Geography around the globe cut out as with a jig-saw using the paired shadow-shapes as templates.. Some of the maps are of currently contested areas – borders between the First and the Third Worlds (El Paso, Texas/Juarez, Mexico), occupied territories (Israel/Palestine) and claimed states (New Zealand/Aotearoa). Others may have been once or may be again'.