Exhibition | Portland Show

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11th Biennial Portland Show
Greenhut Galleries
April 7 – May 28, 2022

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 9 from 1-3 pm (EST)

Participating artists: Chris Beneman, Matt Blackwell, Mary Bourke, Gary Buch, Brian Chu, Thomas Connolly, Sandi Donnelly, Tom Flanagan, Linden Frederick, Philip Frey, Kathleen Galligan, Tom Glover, Alison Goodwin, Abe Goodale, Roy Germon, Frank Gregory, Tom Hall, Lindsay Hancock, Celeste Henriquez, Maret Hensick,Thomas Higgins, Lissa Hunter, Tina Ingraham, Hilary Irons, William Irvine, Penelope Jones, Sarah Knock, Margaret Lawrence, C Michael Lewis, Don Matson, Dean McCrillis, Erin McGee Ferrell, Nancy Morgan Barnes, Colin Page, Tom Paiement, Liz Prescott, Shannon Rankin, Alison Rector, Alec Richardson, Kathleen Robbins, Jenny Scheu, Kathi Smith, Alice Spencer, Sean Ware, Holden Willard, Richard Wilson

For more information
Greenhut Galleries
146 Middle St, Portland, ME 04101
(207) 772-2693

Image: Circumvent, 2022, handcut, layered printed maps on paper, 9 x 6 1/2 inches
PRIVATE COLLECTION

Benefit | FAR x WIDE

FAR x WIDE | Project for Ukraine
March 15, 2022

I have donated one of my map weavings for FAR x WIDE: Project for Ukraine. Over 65 artists have donated their art to help raise funds for the people of Ukraine. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the artwork will go to Razom’s Emergency Fund for Ukraine.

For more information visit: www.farbywide.com

With artwork by: Aaron Wexler, Adriana Farmiga, Alex Diamond, Alison Kudlow, Allison Honeycutt, Amy Sacksteder, Ariel Shea, Beatrice Wolert, Becky Brown, Beka Goedde, Brett Day Windham, Crystalle Lacouture, Elisa Soliven, Emily Noelle Lambert, Emily Weiner, Georgia Elrod, Gretchen Scherer, Hilary Doyle, Holden O'Brien, Jamie Romanet, Jane Kang Lawrence, Jason Rohlf, Jean Nagai, Jenna Ransom, Jenny Kemp, Jess Willa Wheaton, Jessica Simorte, Joey Weiss, Jordan Buschur, Julia Westerbeke, Justin Richel, Karen Dana Cohen, Karen Lederer, Katie Merz, Katy Krantz, Kerri Ammirata, Ky Anderson, Lauren Dana Smith, Lauren Portada, Liz Ainslie, Leonora Loeb, Malik John-Marc Purvis, Matthew F Fisher, Matthew López-Jensen, Max Manning, Meredith Iszlai, Michael Gac Levin, Mira Schor, Monica Carrier, Naomi Kawanishi Reis, Nina Kintsurashvili, Rachel Klinghoffer, Rachel Ostrow, Rob Matthews, Rob Nadeau, Sarah Morejohn, Shannon Rae Fincke, Shannon Rankin, Sharon Servilio, Shoshannah White, Stephanie Sherwood, Stuart Diamond, Sunny Chapman, Susan Carr, Taylor Loftin, Theresa Hackett, Thomas Spoerndle, Will Hutnick, Zach Seeger

Image: Subduction No. 5, 2021, Ink on hand-woven geologic maps, 9 x 6 inches
PRIVATE COLLECTION

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ABOUT: Far x Wide is an artist-run project that organizes thematic group exhibitions and art benefits presented online and in available spaces. Far x Wide seeks to explore a range of ideas by bringing artists together and providing an opportunity for the public to support their work while also supporting social and environmental justice organizations. Far x Wide is based in Brooklyn, NY and was founded by Jessica Cannon in October 2017.

Commission | Flowers of Life

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‘Flowers of Life’ | Participating Artists: Loutje Hoekstra, Philippe Stella, Angu Walters, Polly Verity, Alice Walton, Sam Chirnside, Tatianna Filidonos, Michael Hutter, Director Jacq, Shannon Rankin, Wang Ge, Marisa Papen + Michael Chichi

Earth Family commissioned a group of 13 international artists to produce a collection of interpretations. “By gathering these different visions and distinct lenses we aspire to push this vital cultural conversation forward & transform our beliefs around the vagina.” - Marisa Papen and Michael Chichi

Learn More

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‘Flowers of Life’ is available for sale as a limited edition set of 13 art prints/calendar and a book/manifesto.

Prints / Moon Calendar
The calendar is based on the 13 Moon Calendar, which we see as a beautiful and natural re-framing of time. We also included the bridge to the Gregorian calendar, so it can still be used in the practical sense. However conceptually it’s designed to amplify the cyclical theme of life.

Book
This thoughtfully designed manifesto contains all 13 art prints from the series, artist statements, philosophical musings, scientific studies, poems, essays, illustrations, photography & more.

With writing by :
Daniel Coffeen, Marisa Papen, Loutje Hoekstra, The Law of Time, Dr. Subba Roa and more.

Visit the Earth Family Shop

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I chose to participate in this important project because it is time to move beyond the limiting beliefs surrounding the feminine. Over the years, I have connected to the ‘Flower of Life’ symbolism in various ways including creating a large-scale map installation, composed of sacred geometry using the Vesica Piscis - the intersection of two circles refers to the pairing of two worlds; the sacred and earthly.

For this project, I created four ‘Flower of Life’ interpretations using layers of hand-cut and stippled vellum. These works evolved out of my Simpling Series.

These explorations refer to seeds, flowers and fruit; and have an emotional undertone and an indication of sexuality. They capture the essence of fertilization and reproduction; and celebrate the wonders of nature and the female body. The sacred symbolism of the ‘Flower of Life’ in all forms represents pure potential, rebirth, growth and emergence.

Exhibition | Counter Mapping

516 ARTS | Counter Mapping
October 16, 2021 – January 22, 2022

516 ARTS presents Counter Mapping, a group exhibition and series of public programs focusing on map-related artworks by 14 local, national, and international artists and art collectives. Co-curated by Viola Arduini and Jim Enote (Zuni Pueblo), the exhibition engages with geography, identity, politics, and the environment through painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation. “Counter mapping” is a practice of mapping against dominant power structures to reclaim stories and memories of place.

This exhibition is inspired in part by Jim Enote’s work on a counter mapping project he led for the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center at Zuni Pueblo, where he invited several Zuni artists to create maps of the region from a Zuni perspective. He says “It has been said by many that more lands have been lost to Native people through mapping than through physical conflicts.” 

Counter Mapping springs from a time when maps have acquired a central presence in our lives. From election maps, to color-coded data collection on the Covid-19 pandemic, maps have become a familiar and often contested visual language. The exhibition challenges the common idea of maps as objective and universal tools for geographical knowledge. Conventional Western mapping has been historically used to track, register, and achieve land exploitation. Today, with processes such as gerrymandering, mapping performs an important role in political, social, and cultural systems. This exhibition investigates how different ways of tracking and mapping affect the meanings and perceptions of places, and reflect upon the power structures that define those views. 

The co-curators of Counter Mapping examine diverging approaches to mapping from their own experiences – Jim Enote as an Indigenous leader, activist and farmer, and Viola Arduini as an immigrant and educator. 

They have included work by artists Val Britton (Portland, OR), Felipe Castelblanco (Colombia/Switzerland), Cortney Metzger (Osage - Albuquerque, NM), Shannon Rankin (Roswell, NM), Jamie Robertson (Huston, TX), Ana Serrano (Portland, OR), UglyJerry, Steven Yazzie Navajo - Denver, CO), Mallery Quetawki (Zuni Pueblo - Albuquerque, NM), Drew Trujillo(Albuquerque, NM), Minnoosh Zomorodinia (San Pablo, CA), and collectives Basement Films (Albuquerque, NM), Cog*nate Collective (San Diego, CA), and Friends of the Orphan Signs (Albuquerque, NM).

These artists question what constitutes a map, what aspects of the land are mapped and for what reason. For example, Val Britton examines the marks and symbols that compose maps, creating immersive and site-specific installations for the public to explore. Jamie Robertson creates counter narratives that delve into the artist’s African American heritage. The Albuquerque collective Friends of the Orphan Signs offer a communal and public archive that expands outside the gallery space and invites the audience to participate.

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Counter Mapping
ON VIEW | October 16, 2021 – January 22, 2022
View Fall/Winter Program Calendar
View Counter Mapping Brochure with the curators’ essays

Feature | 12 NM Artists to Know

Southwest Contemporary | The New Mexico Field Guide, 2021
Shannon Christine Rankin: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now
MAY 25, 2021

Artist Shannon Christine Rankin works with maps to depict new, reimagined, and ever-changing geographies.

Roswell, NM | shannonchristinerankin.com | @shannonchristinerankin

The Earth often feels entirely quantified; as if everything is laid out neatly and named. But of course, maps are surprisingly inaccurate. The relative size of things, even the fact that most of South America is east of Florida, are often eschewed in our own mental maps. And then, of course, there are the borders that shift, the rivers and glaciers slowly moving, and in our own neighborhoods, the “desire trails” created across a patch of grass trod by too many pedestrians, the nameless but familiar alleys that never shore up in any atlas.

Shannon Christine Rankin works with maps and their vernacular to orient us anew to the world and its most enduring quality: change. In series like Earth Embroideries, she transcribes melting ice sheets in Antarctica via satellite imaging into minimal depictions with thread on paper, literally confronting our attempt to hold on to (and hold in our hands) what we can, even as the environment around us shifts, both challenging and sentimentalizing the act of map-making.

With change inevitably comes fragility. Nothing lasts, old things fade away. Rubbings created from uneven topographies in charcoal create gulfs on paper; nautical charts lose their bearings in collages created as laments for polar ice sheets. By splicing, scaling up and down, and reimagining the structure we put to place, we are called to look closer and closer. To ask: what is that most familiar terrain beneath your feet and in your mind? The sandstone and shale on this swath of land are here because this was once a shallow sea, but there’s a new geography now. Throughout Rankin’s work, these new geographies are multiplied, layered, and complicated by perception, experience, and the sense of aliveness inherent in change. — Maggie Grimason

Maggie Grimason is a writer and editor living in Albuquerque, NM. She edited a collection of essays on public art, Visually Speaking, was previously the Arts & Lit editor of the Weekly Alibi, and contributes to many other independent publications. When she's not writing, she's walking the bosque, planning her next trip, or writing poetry in bed.

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Exhibition | Tactile Sublime

DODOMU
Tactile Sublime
June 3 - 29, 2021

VIEW THE EXHIBITION

dodomu is a contemporary online gallery with a team based in Brooklyn, NY. We focus on showcasing emerging artists through online group exhibitions and represent a variety of media such as painting, photography, sculpture, digital and mixed media with emphasis on abstraction. While currently all of our operations are virtual, our longterm goal is to open a physical space in the future as we continue to grow.

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Review | Press Herald

Mayo Street Arts Pop-Up Gallery
January 1 - 29, 2021

Review by Jorge S. Arango for the Portland Press Herald

Shannon Rankin uses maps to express the constancy of change. Maps are fundamentally about charting and defining, fixing with exactitude some sense of place. Yet there are metaphorical maps as well: maps of the mind (where memory and experience are the sextants and compasses of a personal cartography), career maps (which navigate the path of our livelihoods), emotional maps (which bind us to expectations about relationships that don’t allow for growth and development), and so on. Yet boundaries keep shifting – glaciers melt, one country annexes another, we have revelations that shatter our identities, we get downsized, we grow apart and divorce. Rankin obscures and changes the neat grids, longitudes and latitudes of her maps using ink, salt and wax. By doing so, she captures the ephemeral reality and usefulness of any map.

– Jorge S. Arango

Exhibition | Postcards of Positivity

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Postcards of Positivity
Artrinity
Dallas, TX

June 15 - July 31, 2020

I donated three pieces to Postcards of Positivity, during the Pandemic, benefiting artists and Artist Relief organized by Artrinity and The Goss-Michael Foundation

For more information visit Artrinity

Images: Untitled l, ll, lll, ink, pigmented graphite, rust, wax on topographic maps, mounted to paper, 6" x 4", 2020.

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Collaboration | Joshua Hagler

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Postcards of Positivity
Artrinity
Dallas, TX

June 15 - July 31, 2020

I collaborated on this piece with Joshua Hagler and we donated it to Postcards of Positivity, during the Pandemic, benefiting artists and Artist Relief organized by Artrinity and The Goss-Michael Foundation

For more information visit Artrinity

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Image: Untitled, 2020, ink oil and wax on collaged topographic map, 6 x 4 inches

A collaboration between Shannon Rankin & Joshua Hagler
Copyright The Artists

Exhibition | Simulacrush

[ON]now | Simulacrush
CMCA's first virtual exhibition
curated by SISTERED
Dec 14, 2019 - Apr 5, 2020

Simulacrush features eighteen artists meditating on states of reality across media. This timely group of work wrestles with systems of difference, communicating and distorting truth in a hyperreal fashion—simulacra. In a moment where information is manifested, digested, and regurgitated with extreme speed, presenting this work in a virtual environment becomes necessary to understanding the states in which we find ourselves and the ways we manipulate it. Here there is an incredible amount of fact, so much that it becomes fiction, or does it? This group of work offers a glimpse at the creation of truth from a distorted copy of reality. This is liquid, urgent, thrashing, seductive.

Artists included:
Ben DeHaan, Zoe Fox, Elizabeth Hoy, Nate Luce, Heather Lyon, Mugwort (Jeonguk Choi + Soomin Kim), Oliver, Shannon Rankin, Joshua Reiman, Bob Richardson, Justin Richel, Tollef Runquist, Will Sears, Matt Shaw, Anoushe Shojae-Chaghorvand, Irina Skornyakova, Riley Watts, Robert Younger

VIEW EXHIBITION

Guest Curator | Curious Nature

Curious Nature
2018 Alumni Triennial Exhibition 
The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art 
Portland, ME

August 3 - September 15, 2018

ICA at MECA

Curious Nature brings together a diverse group of artists who draw inspiration from the natural world. Employing various mediums, from painting to sculpture, photography, and installation, their works are rooted in the act of looking closer.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. - John Muir

These artists explore our relationship with the natural world through investigating the structure of reality, daily rhythms, beauty, texture, and emergent patterns. Focusing their attention on places and processes that are often overlooked, they illuminate the various forces affecting ecosystems and the environment that surrounds us. Their perspectives range from the micro and macro, revealing new views of familiar terrain. In an attempt to capture that which is in a state of constant transformation, they record their surroundings, yielding works that inspire our own sense of awe, inviting us to both celebrate nature and protect it. - Guest Curator, Shannon Rankin ’97.

Rankin’s selections include fifteen artists exhibiting diverse works that range from painting, printmaking and photography, to sculpture, ceramics, metalwork and installation. Artists include: Annika Early MFA ’16 (Portland, ME), Kristin Fitzpatrick (West Kennebunk, ME), Danielle Gerber ’12 (Portland, ME), Alisha Gould MFA ’10 (Kennebunk, ME), Kayla Goulden ’13 (Portland, ME), Lenka Konopasek MFA ’01 (Salt Lake City, UT), Mark Marchesi ’99 (Portland, ME), Tessa Green O'Brien MFA ’16 (South Portland, ME), Isabelle O'Donnell ’17 (Portland, ME), Catherine Quattrociocchi ’17 (Portland, ME), Sam Richardson ’15 (Portland, ME), Celeste Roberge ’79 (South Portland, ME), Bryan Stryeski MFA ’01 (Brooklyn, NY and Avon, CT), Sarah Camille Wilson ’07 (Burlington, VT) and Charley Young MFA ’14 (Halifax, NS).

Images courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. Photography by Kyle Dubay

Review | The Rib

Water is Everything
Drive-By Projects
November 18, 2017-January 16, 2018

Review by Mallory A. Ruymann for The Rib

Water is Everything unpacks the physical, historical, and socio-political shape of water with paintings by Judith Belzer and Cheryl Molnar, and works on paper by Joseph Smolinski and Shannon Rankin.

Molnar's contribution, Cliffside, depicts a house balancing on the edge of a cliff, a structure which Molnar delicately incised into the painting’s wood support. Though not explicitly rendered, erosion and other landscape elements (represented by dense clusters of painted paper) associated with our rapidly changing coastlines hint at the presence of water. Belzer’s small untitled oil-on-canvases (from the Half Empty Half Full series) portray the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. The breakdown of the renewable water cycle means that these dams will soon become obsolete, though their physical forms will persist. Belzer paints the dams in an abstract style that de-emphasizes their present function in favor of their form, presaging their unproductive--but stylized--future role as monuments. The future also concerns Smolinski, whose phosphorescent-like Open Water drawings capture the uncertainty of what climate change may do to bodies of water. Rankin’s Earth Embroideries preserve satellite images of arctic landscapes in the medium of thread on paper, counteracting the ongoing transformation wrought on those landscapes by slowly melting glaciers. A cluster of branded water bottles stands on a plinth at the front window of the exhibition. Not credited to any particular artist, the cooperative sourcing of these vessels offers a potential salve to water’s precarious state. By working collectively around shared goals, we can perhaps determine the destiny of water.

- Mallory A. Ruymann

Exhibition | Water is Everything

Water is Everything
Drive-by Projects
Watertown, MA

November 18, 2017 - January 16, 2018  
Opening reception: Saturday, November 18, 3-5pm  
Hours: Thursday 12 - 4 pm or by appointment 617.835.8255

Drive-by Projects

Water is Everything, an exhibition of paintings by Judith Belzer and Cheryl Molnar, and works on paper by Joseph Smolinski and Shannon Rankin.

Review by Mallory A. Ruymann for The Rib.

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WATER IS EVERYTHING

DRIVE-BY PROJECTS

NOVEMBER 18, 2017 - JANUARY 16, 2018

JUDITH BELZER
CHERYL MOLNAR
SHANNON RANKIN
JOSEPH SMOLINSKI

BY MALLORY A. RUYMANN
REACTION > WATERTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS
JANUARY 25, 2018

Water is Everything unpacks the physical, historical, and socio-political shape of water with paintings by Judith Belzer and Cheryl Molnar, and works on paper by Joseph Smolinski and Shannon Rankin.

Molnar's contribution, Cliffside, depicts a house balancing on the edge of a cliff, a structure which Molnar delicately incised into the painting’s wood support. Though not explicitly rendered, erosion and other landscape elements (represented by dense clusters of painted paper) associated with our rapidly changing coastlines hint at the presence of water. Belzer’s small untitled oil-on-canvases (from the Half Empty Half Full series) portray the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams. The breakdown of the renewable water cycle means that these dams will soon become obsolete, though their physical forms will persist. Belzer paints the dams in an abstract style that de-emphasizes their present function in favor of their form, presaging their unproductive--but stylized--future role as monuments. The future also concerns Smolinski, whose phosphorescent-like Open Water drawings capture the uncertainty of what climate change may do to bodies of water. Rankin’s Earth Embroideriespreserve satellite images of arctic landscapes in the medium of thread on paper, counteracting the ongoing transformation wrought on those landscapes by slowly melting glaciers.

A cluster of branded water bottles stands on a plinth at the front window of the exhibition. Not credited to any particular artist, the cooperative sourcing of these vessels offers a potential salve to water’s precarious state. By working collectively around shared goals, we can perhaps determine the destiny of water.  

Drive-By Projects
Located at 81 Spring Street in Watertown, MA, Drive-By is a small, innovative space committed to exhibiting provocative work in its storefront windows and small gallery.

Founded by Beth Kantrowitz (Allston Skirt Gallery) and Kathleen O'Hara (OHT Gallery), Drive-By is open Thursdays 12-4 and by appointment, though you can always drive by our windows to view the current exhibition.
drive-byprojects.com

Mallory A. Ruymann is an educator, curator, and art historian based in Boston.

Background image:
Shannon Rankin, Earth Emroidery (Glacial Furrows), 2016, hand stitched thread on paper, 7 x 7"

Exhibition | Materiality

Materiality: The Matter of Matter
Center for Maine Contemporary Art
November 11, 2017 - February 11, 2018

You begin with the possibilities of the material. –Robert Rauschenberg

The question of how and why an artist uses materials has long been a topic of consideration in art history. Today, many artists are looking to this question and seeking to find a balance between what they use to make work and the concepts behind them. Providing agency to the materials themselves, artists are looking at materials as a means of communication, whether they are expanding on traditional media and narratives or utilizing everyday objects to construct new forms. Exploring these concerns in their work, the artists included in the exhibition, all with ties to Maine, are also considering why they choose to work with certain matter in our current material culture and social climate, and the role that these materials play within it.

Award | Residency at MASS MoCA

The Studios at MASS MoCA 
August, 2017 
North Adams, MA

The Studios at MASS MoCA

Essay | Where the Dragons Lie

Shannon Rankin: Where the Dragons Lie

“It is not down on any map.; true places never are.” - Herman Melville

Maps are flat; the earth is round. This essential conundrum has bedeviled mapmakers since Ptolemy. How to wrestle the complexities of the three-dimensional world to the two-dimensional mat of the map? Mercator gave a valiant try and his cylindrical projection has withstood the test of time despite vast distortions of landmasses at the poles because a line drawn on his map is a true direction. Charting a course, plotting a line, voyaging from point A to B, sailors traverse the world. Goods move, people travel, knowledge expands; the world grows larger, then contracts, at once vast and infinitesimal.

Where are we? How do we get there? Is there another way?

Questioning the existential to arrive at the concrete, confronting the abstract to embrace the dimensional, we map it out—in life as in art.

Shannon Rankin (b.1971) is an artist who uses the language of maps to explore the complexities and interconnections between the inner and outer worlds, between that which is known and that which remains beyond the field of knowledge, that mythical place on medieval maps where the dragons lie and cherubs blow the wind. The duality of our human capacity for imagination and reason, for creation and destruction, for being of nature and apart from it, is a rhumb line that courses through her work.

Using maps as both material and metaphor, Rankin creates installations, collages and sculptures that play on the parallels and connections found among geological and biological processes, patterns in nature, geometry and anatomy. For instance, Synapse | Diptych, a relatively large two-part piece from 2011, presents a flat circle composed of a web of delicately cut-out red roadways connecting variously shaped bright yellow population centers, the whole sliced down the center to create symmetrically sized halves, the same yet different. The right half has a wide blue river snaking through it, the left has a pronounced branching highway. The title and the divided composition make apparent the analogy to the human nervous system and the cerebral hemispheres—the right and left-brain. Another more macro reading suggests a satellite image of the Earth at night, with the bright lights of city centers illuminated and connected by the electrical grid.

“Maps,” says Rankin, “are everyday metaphors that speak to the fragile and transitory state of our lives and our surroundings. Rivers shift their course, glaciers melt, volcanoes erupt; boundaries change both physically and politically. The only constant is change.”

Course, another work from 2011, takes the form of a meandering soft blue line created from cut and folded polar maps. Presented vertically on the wall, it flows circuitously downward, its accordion pleats compressing glacial time, slowing but not halting the implied melting.

A recent series of collages, Compression 1, 2 and 3, 2016, picks up a similar theme. All are made from reassembled nautical charts of the arctic, sharply cut, sometimes overdrawn in graphite, the multi-layered triangular forms shift under and over each other, referencing the process of the warming and cooling of the polar ice sheets. That they are somberly toned in shades of grey, white and black reinforces their elegiac quality.

Plate 1 and Plate 2, are two other recent works by Rankin that continue the theme of environmental harm. Plate 1 is made from ink and graphite on collaged ocean maps and is one of her most abstract and solemn works. A mere 7 x 7 inches, its impact is larger than its scale. The heavily wrinkled and abraded surface is entirely covered in graphite and black ink, producing a sheen and density akin to an oil slick, a mourning veil for a dying planet. Plate 2 is larger at 16 ¼ x 16 ¼ inches and the underlying geometric grid of the collaged map squares is visible beneath a deep sea-blue. The surface of work is a web of lines and texture, suggesting a net afloat in a turgid sea. Taken together, Plate 1 and Plate 2 are a powerful testament to the Earth’s fragility and its endurance. Can we rescue it from ourselves?

Time as a metaphor and a component of making is embedded in Rankin’s art. Her processes of creation and methods of installation are slow and meditative, involving careful painstaking cutting, the accumulation of many small repeated forms, and the meticulous pinning, stitching or pasting of pieces to form a whole. Sometimes an idea or method is revisited or is carried further in a series, but every work is unique and individual, every installation new to its time and place.

A comparison of Artifacts 1 and Artifacts 2, for example, is instructive for the changes that appear in the four-year interval between their makings. Artifacts, 2011, is made from water-soaked map fragments, torn and adhered to paper measuring 44 x 30 inches. Artifacts 2, 2015, is the same dimensions but presented horizontally. In this later work, the scattered shards of paper are undercoated by hot red orange acrylic, visible along their curled edges. The implications are clear, the world has turned a corner, the Earth is heating up, we are scattering our ashes.

Originally from California’s San Joaquin Valley, Rankin moved to Maine to attend the Maine College of Art in Portland, where she received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree in 1997. A stint working in graphic design in San Francisco, where the work was almost entirely computer based, led her back to Maine to take a job as a pattern cutter for a fashion designer so she could again work with her hands. It was this experience that gave rise to the cutting and sewing techniques that she uses in her art.

“I intricately cut, score, wrinkle, layer, fold, paint and pin maps to produce revised versions that often become more like the terrains they represent,” she says. A case in point is Falls, 2010, an installation created for the Center for Maine Contemporary Art Biennial (which won the Juror’s Prize), composed of hundreds of thin strips of maps, all cut to identical size and pinned in small bunches to the wall, forming the shape of a gently curved isosceles triangle. Each bundled tuft of cut strips bends downward in a graceful pour, taken as a whole they suggest a waterfall. In presenting Rankin with the Biennial award, juror Dennis Pinette writes, “She constructs a convincing deeply playful logic based on a formal understanding of pattern and geometry. Beyond the formal, her instincts propel her art to that rare zone of originality where unique abstract language is clearly defined.”

Rankin now lives in Rangeley, in western Maine’s lake district, surrounded by mountains. When asked recently by an interviewer, “Who is your role model or mentor (alive or dead)? She responded, “Does nature count?”

Lately Rankin has been consciously pushing herself to work outside her comfort zone, challenging herself to making art that is “nebulous, amorphous, ambiguous.” Since April 2016, she has been in Roswell, New Mexico, participating in the yearlong Roswell Artist-In-Residence Program. This “gift of time” has allowed her to take risks and experiment with new materials and methods of working, as well as to respond to a landscape vastly different than Maine.

“For a while now,” she says, “I have worked in a way that has been very controlled and precise. Often the compositions are based on underlying patterns or grids. That hasn’t changed for every series, but I am attempting to shake things up a bit more. Let go of some control. Explore chaos, the unplanned and mysterious.”

Earth Embroideries is a series she began before she left for New Mexico and has continued there, the work is becoming more abstract and more macro in viewpoint with each iteration. They are an obvious departure from her earlier work in that they are not created from the physical material of maps, instead she is distilling satellite views of the arctic into minimal line drawings created in thread on paper. She says, “I’m transcribing a vast amount of physical space into something I can hold and stitch by hand. In some of these I am also incorporating digital glitches which are visible when zooming in on Google Earth.” In a very real sense, the Earth Embroideries are about mending the world.

Unearthed, is another new series Rankin is exploring in Roswell. Inspired by the soil, sediment, light and texture of the New Mexican landscape, these richly patterned works are composed of cut and collaged maps hand-colored in jewel tones, mossy greens, and earthy browns. The compositions are loosely rectangular shapes with open irregular edges; they are her most painterly works to date. “I’ve always had this fantasy of being a painter,” she says, “but I’ve never really loved using paint. Instead, I’m using topographic maps, ink and pigmented graphite.” Haunting in their abstract beauty, the Unearthed collages collectively sound a Greek chorus to our frayed yet lovely planet.

In her most recent work, Rankin moves beyond the known into uncharted territory. She has been experimenting with creating landscapes out of soil, casting them in plaster, then using them to create press molds for ceramic forms that resemble fossils, moonscapes, or the surface of other planetary bodies. “I’m trying to squeeze, combine, merge and overlap the macro and micro,” she says. “I’m always looking in and looking out.”

A map is not the size of the earth its describes. Scale must be determined, as well as which features to include and which to leave out. You can’t include every tree in the forest; generalizations have to be made. Artists are familiar with these considerations and choices. A work of art is not the thing it describes, but something other.

“To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper—maps are the most condensed humanized spaces of all,” writes Robert Harbison in his book Eccentric Spaces. “…they make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of sights we can’t see and spaces we can’t cover.” Likewise with art.

- Suzette McAvoy

This essay was originally published April 27, 2017 and written by Suzette McAvoy for Unity College’s online publication Hawk & Handsaw: Journal of Creative Sustainability

It was also republished in the Interalia Magazine with kind permission from Suzette McAvoy and Deanna Witman the managing editor of Hawk & Handsaw.

Suzette McAvoy has served as director and chief curator of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art since September 2010. She previously served as chief curator of the Farnsworth Art Museum and has lectured and written extensively on the art and artists of Maine. McAvoy received a B.A. in Art History from Hobart & William Smith Colleges and an M.A. in Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program. She lives in Belfast, Maine.

Essay | Overview

Maps are Shannon Rankin’s raw material, her metaphor, her inspiration. She has cut nautical charts into strips and layered them into intricate filigrees; she has crunched and glued geological surveys into paper representations of tectonic plates; she has twisted astronomical diagrams into Mobius strips. She is a virtuoso of pattern, transforming the patterns revealed in maps—contours of mountains, snaking of rivers, constellations of stars, the imposed geometry of city streets—into elegant, disturbing symmetries.

Maps have captured Rankin’s imagination since she was a child and became the designated navigator on family road trips from their home in central California to camp and hike in Yosemite. After she moved East, she flew back and forth across the country to visit family. From 30,000 feet, she saw the continent condensed to a map; she saw in its shapes and lines patterns of affection. For Rankin, maps mark time as well as place, the infinite time of the universe, slow geological time and fleeting human time: the deep, incremental shifts of tectonic plates and the track of an interstate skimming the surface of the continent.

In her recent work at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program in New Mexico Rankin has found new ways to make visible the tension between the clarity of maps and the mysterious randomness of real places. In Earth Embroideries Rankin works from satellite pictures of Antarctica, embroidering striations of pack ice and glacial furrows in black or white thread. The stark, fragile miniatures reduce miles of continent to a small square of paper and hundreds of automatically generated photographs into a few painstaking images. In the Compression series she draws in pencil over arctic nautical charts she has cut up and pieced together, imposing a delicate narrative over a sea of ice. In Compression’s dark counterpart, Plate, Rankin has crumpled tiny squares of ocean maps, overlapped them, glued them together and coated them with opaque ink and graphite, slowly obliterating the information on the maps, replacing it with accretions that echo the texture of the land.

In Unearthed Rankin has cut up and reassembled geological maps of southeast New Mexico and southwest Texas and drawn on them with ink and pigmented graphite, inferring deposits of minerals, human artifacts, ancient sediment, and the Southwest’s red earth and immense landscape . The irregular outlines of the pieces suggest that they are political boundaries, maps of states, but really they are states of mind, layers of subtle information.

Part of the delight of Rankin’s work comes in deciphering the maps, and in the Grid series she plays with the transformation of practical information into private gesture. She has made cyanotypes—developed, literally, blue patterns, on light-sensitive paper; for the red companion pieces, she carefully cut out the red lines of roads from maps. Streets and avenues: where the roads came from is a mystery, and so is where they’re going.

Rankin has always invented her own terrain. She maps landscapes of imagination, juxtapositions of time and place, experience and information transformed and reorganized into elegant and precise and surprising patterns. They are maps of her heart and her mind; they are surprising allegories of human navigation.

Deborah Weisgall has written about the arts for many national publications, including The Atlantic, Fortune, Esquire, and the New Yorker; she has written often for the New York Times. She is also the author of two novels: Still Point and The World Before Her, and a memoir, A Joyful Noise: Claiming the Songs of my Fathers.