Counter Cartographies

Counter Cartographies is the title for the Headland's 2024 Graduate Exhibition. For this identity, the starting point of inspiration came from James Corner. James Corner’s theory of mapping highlights the cartographic sensibility that can be traced throughout the work of the 2024 Headlands’ Graduate Fellow cohort. This exhibition offers up the urban fabric in haunting and delightfully unfamiliar ways. As mappings, the artists’ work defies understandings of the city that would flatten its complexity or sidestep critique. As James Corner notes, cartographies are powerful because they open us up to new ways of thinking about places we think we know. This exhibition of counter-cartographies resists ideological representations of the Bay Area as either a crop of data to harvest or an exploited wasteland. Instead, we are invited to be more present in a flux of “previously unseen or unimagined” realities.