Joseph Gross Gallery Presents Ted Lawson's "The Map is Not The Territory"

For his first solo show at Joseph Gross Gallery, Ted Lawson will début a new series of work consisting of three dimensional wall mounted pieces and freestanding sculptures milled from MDF (a wood fiber based material commonly used in commercial fabrication), brass plate etchings, and three large scale drawings rendered in the artist’s own blood fed intravenously to a CNC (computer numerical control) machine using computer technology akin to a 3D printer.

The show’s title, The Map is Not the Territory, refers to a quote by the 20th century Polish philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski, who pioneered the theory of general semantics that explained human experience as limited by biology and language. The concept serves as a unifying theme to the work in The Map is Not the Territory, which draws imagery from sources ranging from the Hubble telescope (Carina Nebula and Moon) and Renaissance cartography (Orbis Descriptio, produced in collaboration with Shelter Serra) to self-portraiture (Ghost in the Machine), in an overall exploration of the philosopher’s dictum that the abstract representation of something, and our reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Employing the philosophy of Korzybski, Lawson explores how art and technology plays a role in our classification and understanding of the world.

Ted Lawson’s The Map is Not the Territory opens on Thursday, September 11, 6–9pm
at the Joseph Gross Gallery (548 West 28th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan).

The exhibition continues through Saturday, October 4.

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