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

Posted on December 04, 2007