Paula Scher “U.S.A.”

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery presents U.S.A., an exhibition of new paintings by Paula Scher. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Paula Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design for four decades. In the early 1990s, she began painting maps to invent her own narrative about the way she sees the world. Displaying a powerful command of image and type, Scher has devised a novel way of subjectively twisting and confounding the visualization of data.

For this exhibition, Scher has created a body of large-scale cartographic paintings focusing on the United States. Paintings as tall as seven feet depict the country swirling in torrents of information and undulating with colorful layers of hand-painted boundary lines, place names, and commentary. Different sets of data - population demographics, transportation flows, geography, and climate - are employed to make connections and establish patterns. While the information can in no way be interpreted as literal fact, the expression of it demonstrates a personalized understanding of the diversity of the United States.

Scher grew up surrounded by maps. Her father was a civil engineer for the United States Geological Survey who specialized in photogrammetry- the use of photography in surveying and mapping to measure distances between objects. He developed a device called Stereo Templates that corrects the distortion caused by aerial photography. This ultimately led to Scher’s fascination with hierarchies of information and how they are so often distorted and rearranged in order to emphasize certain content.