ROADTRIP(ING): PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC JOURNEYS IN ART

The road trip is psychogeography. Detournment has become Destination Art. Global commerce is the horizon against which art production must now contend. The Psychogeographic is the technique for rending these realities visible. We are a generation of defacto-Debordians.

But what can help us to get a sense of how this is the case today? Whether through the play of simultaneity and symbol in the art of Rossitza L. Todorova; the deconstructed images of local and global forces in the works of Estrella Payton; the mixture of free association journaling and digital mapping in the works of Lillian Morrissey; the haunting records of geographic erosion by Jonathan Marquis; the space that political memory marks out in the real-time imagery of Conor Elliott Fitzgerald; the conflict between constructed and naturalistic spaces in the multi-media works of Travis Ivey; the subtle sense of private narratives accorded to suburban life in the paintings of Cam DeCaussin; the fusion of figure and environment in the works of Abbey Messmer; the juxtaposition of the figural against the infinite horizons of our life-world in the works of Megan Berner; and the repurposing of waste as a new kind of socio-politico aesthetic in the imagery of Emily Ritter; we find that all of these works are implicated in the new logic of psychogeografik experience. It is the diversity of these kinds of artistic investigations that this "call and response" edition of Road Trip: Psychogeografik attempts to map.

What we can say is that wherever the mind and an expanded definition of place intersect --- or aesthetics and the expanded field of site-specificity collide --- we find the valences of the psychographic at work. In this case, the graphic here refers to the repurposing of memes, themes and dreams, while the psychological refers to the collective, the ecological and the political unconscious. Between the two terms, (psycho/graphic), stands what remains of our subjectivity, like a terse line that can no longer properly demarcate the thought-image of space from the affective feeling of habitation. As such, the psychogeographicis something of a strategy that splits the difference, making our current socio-psychological realities visible while asking questions about the future of how our psychology will fare against the changing conditions of the geosphere writ large. 

First venue: Road Trip(ping, Fine Art Complex 1101, Opening Reception: Feb 16th, 2019, Show runs: Feb 16-Feb 22nd.

Second venue: Psychogeografik, RAE space for contemporary art Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany, Opening Reception: Saturday May 4th.Show runs: May 4th-19th

A special thank you to the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Germany, and the Poolhaus-Blankenese foundation, Hamburg, Germany, for supporting this international exchange. 

Artists in the show: Marcus Sendlinger, Rossitza Todorova, Estrella Payton, Jonathan Marquis, Conor Elliott Fitzgerald, Emily Ritter, Travis Ivey, Cam DeCaussin, Abbey Messmer, Megan Berner, and Lilian Morrissey.