The Road To Nowhere

B. Shawn Cox

Interview by L. Valena

July 28, 2022

Please start by describing the prompt that you responded to.

It felt very warm and earthy. The piece had a landscape feel. I've been working in different types of media, but the idea of transforming a sense of place into a narrative about place is how the transformation occurred. Using vintage maps, I’ve been doing a lot of modular origami. These interlocking pieces gave me a beautiful sense of place and then maybe describing where one might go to find that place. That was the concept behind it.

You said this is interlocked origami pieces? Tell me more about the process.

Yes. I've been doing this for probably two, two and a half years. I’m trying to dimensionalize text, or the residual meaning in text, without reading the text. There's a word, “palimpsest,” which is essentially the essence or aura of a reading or object. I like this idea of something that somebody held for a long time still having some residual meaning or understanding. I brought that to written materials we don't use anymore, such as atlases, old phone books, and even books! I read on a Kindle. As our society changes, there will be a time when people are like, “What do you mean you had a cord on your phone?” My daughter probably has no idea what a corded phone looks like! “What is that? It's like a weird antenna.”

These artifacts from our culture that once had meaning are now worthless. I’m fascinated by the idea of transforming them into something else that hopefully triggers old memories for people. It does for me, too. Especially in collage work, I'll see these things and think, “Oh yeah, I remember Little Golden Books,” and other things that aren't in our lives anymore. Our society is so digitally motivated. At this point, it's about how many clicks you can get instead of how many books you read, which is disappointing.

Yeah, hopefully that metric will make a comeback.

Indeed! The modular pieces start as a square. Here's one that's all folded up. The cool thing about them is they link up, and then you just build your quilt, essentially. It feels quilty to me. You just build from this module. Whatever you say the scale is, maybe one inch equals 50 miles. That could be 100 square miles of road trip memories. Then you module and add this to this and build and build and build, until you have a quilt of 20,000 miles of road trip memories. Or the road that you've never taken, or whatever metaphor you want. The narrative, lyrical part of that really fascinates me, and the bonus prize is that it’s really pretty. It gives me an opportunity to play with colors and how these modules interlock in a different way that has nothing to do with the information actually on them.

I do my best when I'm linking them together to link the colors so that when you step back, you got a color field and the blues pull in, so it's abstracted. There's a composition that's completely ancillary to the information that I've destroyed. Dr. Seuss books and Little Golden Books give you a lot of color opportunities. But it's an interesting way to deconstruct something and then reconstruct it and hopefully the narrative will resonate to people in a way beyond being just a pretty, flowery, geometric pattern. It's fine if it is, but it’s more than that, at least in my mind.

I want to talk more about this idea of a sense of place, and narrative within place. That's a really beautiful idea and it's easy to forget that every square inch of space that's inhabited by humans has thousands of memories embedded in it.

Yes. What do we do to either celebrate that, or pretend it doesn't exist, or overlay it with our memories? Are our memories really affected by that? Because we can walk into some houses and feel, [makes uneasy noise] “What's going on?” Or it's a warm, charming place. We can homogenize our world by taking a Victorian and painting the whole thing tan, and it's still a Victorian but it's a new statement. The triggers and clues of the details in the fragments affect people differently based on their own experience. It’s fascinating to me that when somebody engages with an artwork, their experience actually determines their understanding. From the experience of a world where nobody's ever seen a map before, maybe this is just pretty patterns and pretty lines.

So we're not so pretty. Maybe instead, it's shocking compared to what their life experience is. That part is beyond fascinating. And the internet has made our world smaller, but it also has made our world oddly flatter. It homogenizes to some extent, but it’s a double-edged sword in that it also exposes us to a potentially broader range of things.

But when AI is layered on top of it, there's a corporate filter that in so many ways is directing us commercially. We are getting a new experience and seeing new things, new wonderful, exciting gadgets and places to go and people to see and all this good stuff. But the motive is far from a life experience. It's not feeling the breeze on our skin or walking into the ocean or smelling the sea salt. It's needing to be at this beach at this time and get an Airbnb so somebody's making money on it. It's going to be ancillary if you wake up and realize how fabulous it is to have the sand between your toes and a crab crawl over your foot or whatever the gig is. That piece of it has really changed our world in a bizarre way. So maybe I'm being old and hoping to resurrect some of those layers of paint off of that remodeled Victorian. Engaging people to think about these things in a slower way is probably important because if we don't, we’re just on a hamster wheel, turning away like a crazy person. That’s me, in so many ways, making these little modules over and over, because the work has resonated really well in my gallery, and that commercial part of it drives me to keep making. So that's good too. “What if I do this?” I’m integrating multiple source works and types of information. I just received a bunch of old scrolls from a player piano. Those kinds of things fascinate me.

I love old technology. I actually have a card catalog in my house.

From the library??

Yes! Talk about an old piece of technology. It’s furniture, but it's also this epic proto computer.

It is. It's pre-computer organization. I love that it's overlaid with a number system, which in my opinion was quite arbitrary, but that's how we did things. We struggled with that system. I went to law school after undergrad and everything was done with keywords. We had these big, overloaded books filled with magic keywords which would tell you what other texts have those keywords in them by number. You’d spend hours digging through all of this to see if the keyword was used in the same context, all this nonsense.

I used to own a coffee house and gallery and we were right in the middle of a tech hub in Boston. A big part of our decor was old technology: card catalog, globes, rotary telephones, all these things. We had an encyclopedia that had a similar book to what you're talking about. It was the keyword book that helped you find all the information within the encyclopedia, and it was incredible. You look up any word, and here's every related phrase that you can think of related to that thing!

Exactly. Doing research is so different now. Rapidly! Our daughter is 14 and she was a baby when the iPad came out. It wasn't that long ago. And before that, there was no such thing. It wasn’t even fathomable that you could carry around a piece of electronics that could connect to the world like that. She was tiny and knew to swipe. She was like, “Mine.” She just figured it out and click click click. It was wild.

Do you have any particular memories about maps?

We lived way out in the middle of nowhere on a ranch in West Texas and we would travel at night. My dad always drove and my mom would have the map, trying to make sure we knew where we were going. I know every single trip was probably an extra hour because of some weird change on our old map or some directional thing. There was anxiety, but it was always comical. We always found some sad, ranch motel to spend the night in. I remember getting that greasy breakfast at a diner in some hotel, like a Howard Johnson's. I was so excited to have greasy, nasty breakfast. Then we’d do our little bit and it was back in the car to figure out where we were going from there. They were these arduous, I guess painful life experiences, but that’s how we used to travel.

I called this piece “The Road To Nowhere,” and thinking about these maps, that's how we felt! Things were not as dependable and reliable. You’d have a tire blowout and you’d be there a day or two. [laughs] “Okay.” It was just a very, very different, slower-paced world. You had the map, you had the tool, and it was up to you to make it work. You had the change the tire. Now, you call AAA and boom, they show up and somebody fixes it, and you move on. I guess it’s sad to remember these weird, angsty family vacations, with the road always a part of it. The Road To Nowhere. And we always ended up getting lost. It was kind of a puzzle you could figure out, and sometimes you’d meet crazy people, and it was just that kind of world. We didn't do a lot of trips, thank goodness. But it was a great, greasy breakfast, and us in a smoke-filled car tooling across the middle of nowhere for hours on end! [both laugh]

I love it. Recently, a friend told me that capitalism is slowly compressing time and space, which makes a lot of sense.

That's it, right? As soon as it's figured out how to monetize time, it's over. We’ve monetized water. You can buy air now. I don't know if that's uniquely American. I haven't done enough traveling overseas to see it, but we do some goofy stuff.

Yeah, we do. It's not really a long game, it's a real short-attention-span sort of model.

It's very true, and we have done amazing things to exponentially shorten that attention span. How long you delay as you're flipping through the Reel or the TikTok or whatever it is, that’s quantified and monetized and feeds into the algorithm. It's so bizarre. I like my little modular squares a lot better.

I do, too.

Thank you.

Is there anything about this process or about this piece that we didn't talk about that you want to talk about?

This piece is probably going to grow. I'll keep folding. I cut up an entire atlas, so it's the whole US, and I’d like to do the whole book. It'll end up being 40 x 40, 50 x 50. They're pretty big. When you step back from that, you get more of an abstract, soft, cloud-like image, and then you move in closer and get the details.

Keep us up to date on that because we want to know how big it gets. Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

See what comes to you organically. Lately, I've been painting cowboys. I had some due dates and I was just cowboy-cowboy-cowboy. At first I was thinking, “Oh my God, how am I going to turn this into a cowboy? I told Lu I would do this and aaaarrrrgh I gotta get these cowboys done!” So I guess, be gentle with yourself and let the idea come. Let the work inspire you instead of inspiring a piece.

Call Number: Y82VA | Y85VA.coRo

B Shawn Cox, an artist living and working in Austin TX, explores the traditional, transformative process of quilting via surface, pattern and the use of processed material as mark. Through various modes of palimpsest, he confront feelings of abandonment through their manipulation of familiar materials. Through cutting, folding, and re-assembly the artist adapts a patina of touch that conveys a sense of nostalgia to the viewer.