 Heather in the past you've had exhibitions about maps as work of art here You have works of art that are being considered maps. Tell us about how this exhibition came to me Well, there's always been a community of artists in this country and abroad that work with maps as they're Jumping off-place. They're they're medium or they're using the techniques to create their work and over the years we've seen their work here and there and We really liked it and so we finally decided to put together the exhibition It's this has been a long time coming and we've been sort of collecting Artists we'd like to invite we invited them and they all said yes, so here's the exhibition And were these all works that are new for this exhibition or were there some of these Existing works that you brought it It's a little bit of both some of the artists did decide to create new pieces for the exhibition in the same style that they had been working in Previously and many of these things are the artists favorites of their own work and Things that they just wanted hadn't shown for a while and wanted to be shown. I Really want the viewer to look at the items and see what they see they should really Inform their opinion with what a map is Because that is part of the process of the art is this is a map and this has certain cultural connotations For maps and I feel that many of the artists go forward from that into their work It's a doorway if you will I Don't necessarily want people to be unsettled, but I want them to really look and think what does this mean as a Meta concept what does this mean for me? Jeff you have two pieces in this current exhibit at the ocean map library tell us about the one we're standing in front of now It's actually six pieces here. These are all drawings from my sketchbook, and I've been Carrying a leather notebook with the same size sketchbook for the last 30 years And these are all drawings from one year where I was drawing roads that All met in the middle well one thing I've believed for a long time is one of the greatest American sculptures is the the freeway system particularly in California and when you see a stack of freeway Overpasses racked up above each other and look at the sweeping curves. You realize it's incredible Manmade invention and you have to be driving to look at it, and I've driven through so many of them that I Just find them beautiful. Tell me about your second piece in the exhibit. My second piece is a screen print It's a it's from a rubbing of a map that I dissected I took a triple-a road map and I cut away everything that wasn't a road and in order to store them I generally fold them back up So if you've ever folded a road map imagine folding one that's been sliced to ribbons And then I took that and I used a pencil and I made a rubbing of that and I turned that rubbing into a screen print and So because it's tactile rather than visual I ended up with a visual thing where you can see all the layers of the folded map Well, these are visual and they carry a certain information That's divorced from the information that a map carries and one thing you have to remember about maps is they have a lifespan and maps get obsolete and you generally throw them away and so by taking a map and using it in an art you've changed its purpose from an Information carrier to a different kind of information carrier and in a sense you've increased its lifespan I want them to look at the beauty of the map I mean because it's it's one of mankind's densest carriers of information and a lot of them are beautifully done When you're driving down a highway a lot of times all you're seeing is the road in front of you and a line of green trees onto the side and What a map does is it pushes you way up above that and lets you see everything that you can't see and So a lot of my work takes you back and tries to get you to the beauty of the map itself When you look at it normally look at a map you sort of can see where you are. It's a specific place and You get the map maker sort of helps you get to where you want to go in this Exhibition in many of the works the viewer is going to decide where they go and not the map maker Is that is that part of the intention behind the work? I believe so a number of these artists do have Certain recognizable places on the map for instance these maps are of three East Coast cities There are Collage maps in here where if you get close enough you can read place names But it's also kind of Pulling back from this is a thing that shows you where Things are in geography and because it's on a flat piece of paper. That's an abstraction in and of itself but I think they further that and Take away a lot of visual cues that you find on a map But it's still recognizable as something that is or was a map The work we looked at from Jeff Woodbury is very definitely something that is based on a Shape if you will that is used in a map we have for instance the gunpowder drawing of of river systems that is a Map of a river system, but it is also very abstract that work the artist takes a piece of paper and Draws on it with gunpowder, so they take grains of gunpowder and lay it down in lines as if as you would with a pencil then it's sandwiched the paper is sandwiched between two pieces of wood and There's a fuse in there and the artist lights the fuse and it burns away the gunpowder Which marks the paper and if it's done, right? It doesn't consume the paper so at least it leaves a black Smoky mark on the paper and it actually looks like Pencil that's been smudged How long is the exhibit in place for and where can people get more information? The exhibition is up until March 10th of 2018 There is information about it on our website www.oshermaps.org and It's on the I believe it's on the visit tab for exhibitions