Cartography is just one instance of an essentially anthropocentric attempt at organizing the world—an attempt wherein the notion of space is subordinated to locations of significant places. Seductive in their formal qualities of line, shape, color and text, Lordy Rodriguez’s nomadic maps are no exception to this desire to order our experiences of the world. States of America is a decade long project that, utilizing the language of cartography, sets out to re-map the United States. In addition to the fifty known states Rodriguez gives us five more to complete his project: Internet, Hollywood, Monopoly, Disney and Territory. The presence of these additional states suggests that our geography is as much a state of mind as a concrete reality, a key idea surrounding all of Rodriguez’s drawn places.

Lined up and stacked atop one another throughout AMOA’s central galleries, Rodriguez’s mythical States are visually striking. Multitudes of place names populate the precisely drawn maps, pulling you into their carefully articulated surfaces. Once you are there, the drawings create an immediate sense of spatial disjunction. Rodriguez’s re-locating and re-shaping of major cities, municipalities, territories and neighborhoods throw into question what you know about geographic location. Hollywood, for example, borders a newly shaped Republic of Texas. From state to state you are met with these unfamiliar juxtapositions of location and landscape, until one place blurs into another in rapid succession and eventually numbing repetition.

This repetition of form and strategy eventually diminishes the rewards of looking at the drawings individually. The exhibition’s monotony may stem from the larger organization and installation of the project. Rodriguez wants us to see States of America as a single piece, yet the drawings are framed individually and hung with little apparent attention to their relationship with one another. The straightforward installation is a missed opportunity to further complicate our notions of the map and place. In addition, a few of the drawings were unavailable for the exhibition. If parts of the map are missing, where does this leave the piece as a whole? There is tremendous reward to be found in peering into the individual drawings and reveling in their disjunctive effect, but the larger project suffers from the missing pieces and an inconsequential installation.

More noticeable variation in his approach to each of the fifty-five states could only compliment Rodriguez’s deft handling of his medium and skill at making an image on paper. A topographic map with its network of frenetic concentric lines, or even a map or two of a specific city’s streets would be a welcomed change in point of view, like the key map, which “zooms out” offering a view of all 55 states and changing our location as a viewer more dramatically.

Memory, travel and the creation and definition of place loom large under the surface of Rodriguez’s drawings. Artistic precedents can be found in the work of visionary artists and architects, whose speculative practices use our knowledge of the world and re-imagine it. As with those visionary artists and architects of the recent past, the question remains whether the work is merely a paper reality or behind the surface there is something concrete patiently waiting to take form. In Rodriguez’s case, the latter is possible. Given his reliance on personal experience to create them, Rodriguez’s maps may be not only a two-dimensional proposition, but also the residue of a corporeal reality.

Eric Zimmerman is an artist living and working in Austin.