The latest exhibit to be housed in the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, located at the northern terminus of Carnegie Mellon's Purnell Center for the Arts, contains the work of Joyce Kozloff, a graduate of CMU (then the Carnegie Institute of Technology), class of 1964.

Kozloff's "Exterior and Interior Cartographies" is a two-part exhibit. The first floor houses a three-channel presentation of video, audio, and images from the growing number of American protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, entitled "Disarming Images." It shows protests that occurred between 2001 and 2005, and was compiled by a group of artists to which Kozloff belongs, Artists Against the War.

This presentation of global politics fits perfectly with the larger, second half of the exhibit, entitled "Exterior and Interior Cartographies," which catalogs Joyce Kozloff's work over the past fifteen years. Her personalized and politicized maps are an excellent compliment to the film's protests against more heavy-handed border editing.

The works themselves are, generally, renderings in paint of historical or current maps, sometimes with multiple maps layered on top of each other, sometimes with other images collaged onto the map.

The "Boy's Art" series was made collaboratively with the artist's young son, whose monsters, soldiers, planes, weapons, and guns were photographically reduced and inserted into various maps. Of these, a particularly excellent piece is #6: Havana, which depicts the port of Havana, Cuba, surrounded by weapons and ships. On one side of the image is a short series showing a Cuban courtship ritual.

Other series include the "Knowledge" series, a collection of globes in various states of fullness: sometimes maps only occupy one hemisphere (the other is blank), or have large gaps, in an effort to describe not only what the mapmakers of various eras knew, but what they didn't know.

What seemed to be the most directly human piece was Bodies of Water, 1997, a collection of continents and oceans, overlaid with displaced bodily organs, including veins, intestines, lungs, capillaries, hearts, eyes.

Overall, the exhibit is well worth going to. Its charm and power lies in its subtlety, requiring an open mind and careful examination – this is not an exhibit to rush through. But for those who take the time to look, these maps might take them somewhere they never expected.

The exhibit will run through October 15, 2006. The Miller Gallery is open from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.

At 5:30 p.m. on Friday, September 22, both Joyce Kozloff and one of her collaborators, Ann Messner (a professor at the Pratt Institute) will discuss the "Disarming Images" video. This talk will take place inside the Gallery. For more information, contact Jenny Strayer.

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