Val Britton

Val Britton
At frst glance, Val Britton’s maps look as though they document the correct borders of real countries. But they’re actually journeys through her memories - some intact, some fragmented, some marked by incisions - inspired by the longing to connect to her father; an eternal traveller, driving his truck through the endless expanses of the United States.

Winter 2008/09

New American Paintings, Book #79

Principal Juror - Rita Gonzalez, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

2008 Pacific Coast Edition (released December 2008)

Shotgun Review: There's No Place Like Here

One such work is Val Britton's work Continental Drift. Constructed using ink, graphite, tape, and paper, this sprawling collaged and incised expanse occupies one of the biggest walls I have ever seen outside of a museum. The size of the towering wall heightens the delicacy and fragility of the marks that congeal within the work into vaguely felt landmasses of memory. The logic of mapping structures this work, but rather than expressing concrete features of a intelligible landscape, Britton's work uses mapping to explore ephemeral regions of memory and speculation. Britton has expressed that this work, and the body of work to which this piece belongs, spring from her longing to connect to her father, a long haul truck driver who died more than a decade ago. The longing for this connection has poured itself into the work through her desire to find the past and fill in the parts she says she can never know. The restive voids in Britton's work are filled with a seductive mystery similar to the blank spaces at the edges of old maps. As specific as Britton's impetus for these works may be, they ask for no explanation. The honesty and earnestness of her seeking imbues the work with a force and structure that sends us each down our own half remembered paths of meaning and memory until they fade away into the unrecoverable.

Zachary Scholz, December 4, 2007

The Artful Home: Val Britton

I was transfixed by her delicately traced and layered, softly stained, and intricately cut and stitched paper map collages, which seemed to evoke some strange, unknown -- and unknowable -- geography.

Leah Hennen, November 2, 2007

Shotgun Review: Excavations

And Val Britton’s walls. Her large-scale maps of her deceased father’s truck routes are, in the end, anything but mournful. Breaking from the traditional dependence on topographical ring work to provide movement, she’s able to elicit a deeply believable and somehow constant chaotic throbbing by way of slashes and physical overlay. They may have arisen from the static Rand McNally, but these beautified renderings of that lonesome profession seem less like maps than stories from daughter to absent father. While successfully holding entire rooms captive, it is in the lure of their three-dimensional detail that they are able to seduce the audience into their both bold and intricate narratives, marked by monumental lines and frail continents.

Chaz Reetz-Laiolo, June 11, 2007

ON THE LEVEL / ‘Excavations’ / New Oakland gallery displays ‘magical mix’ of emerging and established artists

Other pieces include Misa Inaoka’s “Moss Ceiling” (which will be a permanent installation), Jana Flynn’s sewn paper and canvas collages, Mark Brest van Kempen’s models of future park projects, and Val Britton’s maps. “She (Britton) does these incredible works with paper,” Johansson says. “Her father was a truck driver, and in memory of him she wanted to put his truck routes onto maps. She works very large – she's done 10 feet by 10 feet collages of map and paper.”

Reyhan Harmanci, San Francisco Chronicle, May 10, 2007

Out of Time - Time Lines at Mina Dresden

The Earth explodes in the delicate art of Val Britton. In such works as Continental Drift, the artist cuts and colors large sheets of paper, filling expanses with chaotic lines and abstract shapes, contradicting the immeasurable forces of the Earth ripping itself apart with the frailty of her medium. Her point – that our world is as impermanent as a page of loose leaf – makes her a natural for the group show “Time Lines,” in which 11 artists “represent, chart, navigate, and deconstruct concepts of time.”

Michael Leaverton, SF Weekly, February 9, 2007
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SF #249: Cover Design Credit

Flavorpill, February 2007
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