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Consider the block you are standing on, where have you just come from? Where are you going?

Now, you have conceptually charted your personal travels through urban space and a map has been imagined that is unique to you. A map charted by cartographers and published by the New York City Transit Authority or Department of Tourism might look very abstract in comparison, compressing the city into two-dimensional geometric shapes. The work exhibited here, by Julia Goodman and Bettina Johae, reflect upon how abstract maps truly are.

Goodman and Johae create and recreate maps but in very different ways. Goodman’s paintings could be interpreted as a fragmented map of North Shore Long Island, the place where she was raised and from which she draws inspiration. Her flattened depiction of Long Island’s topography, as well as her bold use of color, careens notions of place into an area of painterly abstraction. Johae works in the opposite direction by literalizing places within an actual map and then photographing the real places the map supposedly represents.

Julia Goodman describes her paintings as “an abstract field of mark making, a perceptible world with which to enter and to ultimately get lost.” The perceptible world Goodman refers to is symbolic of the cartographer’s view of the world from above, which she methodically utilizes in her artistic explorations of her home, her family and her self. She calls each painting a self-portrait perhaps because each painting is an abstraction of representation, which is also arguably a characteristic of maps. By implementing methods of color field painting akin to abstract expressionists and maintaining a semblance of mapped space, Goodman oscillates between the known and uncharted. Maps are a point of departure for Goodman, but the result is a place she made herself. Julia Goodman is a senior in the BFA program at NYU Steinhardt. She grew up in North Shore, Long Island.

Bettina Johae’s photographic series, tourists’ paths, berlin (2007-ongoing), documents sites along proscribed walking tour maps routinely dispensed for those visiting Berlin. As a native of that city, Johae engages the “official” view of Berlin and how destination sites are designated as meaningful. Installed within this exhibition is a layered map of 27 pre-drawn walking routes Johae found in guidebooks of Berlin, which illustrate the concentration of paths deemed suitable for representing the city’s culture. Johae’s photographs reveal locations of friction, where dominant perceptions of a place may not correspond to the current lives and experiences entwined with that place. Her strategic documentation while walking along the tour inverts the map-making process. She deconstructs the supposed meaning inherent in maps of culture and brings the concept of place into the abstract. Bettina Johae graduated from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development’s Master’s Program in Studio Art.

Abstract Atlas: Julia Goodman and Bettina Johae is curated by Jamie Kulhanek, Tricia Owlett and Molly Shea with assistance from Roslyn Esperon as part of the course, Curatorial Praxis. This course is offered by the Visual Arts Administration Program, part of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Special thanks to Mark Johnson in the Department of Art, and Jovana Stovic, curator of the Kimmel Center Galleries.

For further information, please contact: Kimmel.galleries@nyu.edu