Suggested North Points

MATRIX 207/Suggested North Points

Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, 2003
The floor drawing, Suggested North Points

giving the exhibition its title and theme, includes ten stylistic north arrows drawn on the floor of the gallery taken from an early nineteenth-century cartography book, shown here.
I warped the cartography diagram to fit the irregular shape of the MATRIX gallery's floor plan. True north, magnetic north and the declination of difference reference the struggle to find one's own direction.
Installation detail of floor drawing, Suggested North Points

Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, 2003
West and East

2003, hand-stitched, hand-dyed cotton, plywood, laminate, mattress frame, 80 x 60 x 17 in. (each)

West shows in its color abstraction the vivid colors of a Hollywood sunset, with all the glamour of California's surf and celebrity culture. Its stitch pattern is the exploding energy of the Big Bang, with the cone of arrows showing the universe's accelerating expansion.

While West represents extroversion, East is its opposite, introversion. The colors of East show the setting sun glowing behind the pine trees at the edge of a New England field, while its stitch pattern represents space and light collapsing around the force of a black hole.
West

detail
East

detail
MATRIX 207/Suggested North Points

Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, 2003
South

detail

The abstract landscape of South is from Red Rocks National Park, where surprising red rocks jut out of the desert. The stitch pattern shows the metabolic pathways of a cell, as just in a desert ecosystem, every reaction is dependent upon the surrounding available material.
North

2003, hand-stitched, hand-dyed cotton, plywood, laminate, mattress frame, 80 x 60 x 17 in.

The color abstraction of North references a winter landscape with low light casting shadows across a snowy field. The stitch pattern for North illustrates the criteria for cell production of ATP, the human body's source of energy. Within the exhibition, North represents the idea of potential energy, the step before actual energy production.
North

detail
Influence

2003, hand-stitched cotton, 80 x 60 x 17 in.

Here black thread stitched into black fabric shows parallel lines shifting ninety degrees at an undefined border of the United States. The icon of the United States surfaces and recedes through the juxtaposition of shadows.
Influence

detail

The four front sculptures—West, East, North, and South—depict specific “American” landscapes in their color abstraction while their stitch patterns illustrate the use, exhaustion, and regeneration of energy in the cosmos and the human body. The sculpture in the background, Influence, examines the United States as a political and economic global presence.

Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Berkeley Art Museum MATRIX curator, writes: “Suggested North Points, Von Mertens’s MATRIX installation, is about living in America and the artist’s own westward migration. The exhibition includes a floor drawing as well as five quilt sculptures. Four of the five quilts suggest specific places in the North American landscape to form a personal, geographic portrait of the artist, while the floor work—drawing on nineteenth-century cartography—and fifth quilt allegorically posit the age-old quandary of the relationship between an individual and the collective whole: the attempt to find one’s own direction while working within an existing system.”