"Zoom +/-", an enjoyable excursion through the theme of mapping, is threaded with good humor and clever subversion of the map's physical integrity and implicit authority. Nineteen artists — youngish and older; East Coast, West Coast and beyond; painters, sculptors, photographers, makers of videos and collages — are represented in the show, organized by Doug Buebe and Sherry Frumkin for Area 1.

Nina Katchadourian’s works are among the wittiest exploration of the map as both discrete object and indicator of position. Cutting away interstices and leaving only linear routs, she transforms a subway map into a delicate tangles nest and photographs it resting in the palm of a hand. She cuts our Finland’s longest road and curls it, like a fragile specimen, into a petri dish. Her genealogical chart of comestibles (Mrs. See’s begetting Wolfgang Puck, cousin to the Sun Maid raisin girl and so on down the generations to the Gerber baby) is a wry, hilarious take on branding.

In Joyce Kozloff’s richly layered images, drawn maps of battle sites are embellished with children’s drawings of superheroes and UFOs and studded with tiny reproductions of resonant imagery from the Italian Renaissance to German Expressionism. Place becomes the sum of recollection and imagination.

Another provocative high-light in Christian Nold’s Newham Sensory Deprivation Map. Some 30 students at a London college were sent out in pairs, one wearing a blindfold and earplugs, the other with a GPS device, pen and paper. The resulting map dismisses with familiar campus landmarks and roads, instead redefining the environment according to smells, breezes, levels of comfort and discomfort, hunger, texture, feelings of confusion and relief. Place and experience connect in a literal and yet suggestive way.

Among the other notable works in the show are a skittish etching by Jeff Woodbury, Robert Walden’s painted Ontological Road Maps and co-curator Doug Buebe’s worm-eaten Erosion collages.

©Los Angeles Times