These psychic, corporeal cemetery maps were made to visualize the idea of “body territory:” that communal burial sites can be thought of as an extension of the human body. These are maps of All Faith’s Cemetery in Queens, NY that are rendered as psychic geography, seeing each place on earth as both completely unique, and equally important - along with its individual configurations of plants, animals, and spirits. This place contains multiple, concurrent timeframes and spatial realities that flow from one to another. To translate this cosmological space into Christian lexicon: these maps could be read in the same way as Hieronymus Bosch’s alter piece, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” as simultaneously representing Heaven, Earth, and Hell.
The Hell Psychic Corporeal Map Panel is based on mythological images of the European world mountain. The mountain is shown as hovering in the air, made from an enormous pile of waste material emanating from the centralized, rational individual who sits in the center of geometrical garden paths. Just as this individual’s defecation is creating the world mountain, his breath is creating a cloud of industrial pollution topped by the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Circled around are the creatures of the world, bleached to white, and chained to a monument representing financial and hegemonic world order. Around the outer circle are human remains, indicators of the endgame, zero-sum logic of mass consumption and inequity.
The Earth Psychic Corporeal Map depicts All Faiths as transitory space. Hybrid creatures, a combination of grassy plants, winged insects, and human skeletons move through the space both above and below ground. The center of the garden holds a large monument to the dead, as well as to the life that flourishes in the immediate holobiome of the garden. The ring of animalistic mountains around the cemetery has a head, two arms, two legs, and a tail, indicating that while the cemetery is a land, it is also a body.
The Heaven Tapestry Map Panel depicts an intertwined, multispecies organism in which the below and above ground realms are combined into undifferentiated consciousness. Taking into consideration recent scientific thinking about “panpsychism,” the idea that consciousness pervades the universe, this work sees the under- and above-ground realm as suffused with a shared sentience. In this tapestry, we see human remains, tombstones, mycelial networks, roots, stones, land, air, tentacles, hands, and eyes meld into a single body of living tissue surrounded by grassy fur.
Psychological map of Bellevue, depicted as a living entity with the Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM) the site of the exhibition for which this map was created, in the center. An underground view of mycchorizal networks intertwining, sometimes erotically, with human skeletons.