Texan artist, Matthew Cusick creates these fascinating artworks by cutting apart maps according to shade and colour and pasting them onto boards to form collages depicting landscapes, highways and people. The particular maps he uses for certain work have a deeper meaning than purely for their shade of colour: “The people I construct out of maps represent certain ideas and moments in time that resonate deeply with me,” he says. “The maps I choose for each work relate to that person’s timeline and history. I’ll use these maps as a surrogate for paint but also as a way to expand the limits of representational painting. Each map fragment is employed both as a brush stroke and a unit of information. The human form acts as a matrix in which inlaid maps from different places and times coalesce into a narrative.”
