
Artist
Agnes Denes (1931-)
Title
Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space--Map Projections: The Snail
Date
1979
Medium
Watercolor, metallic pigments, and pen and ink on paper with screenprint on plastic overlay
Dimensions
Sheet (Irregular): 24 × 30 in. (61 × 76.2 cm)
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from Charles Tanenbaum
Accession number
2001.167
Rights and Reproductions Information
© artist or artist’s estate
Object Label
Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space—Map Projections: The Snail is from a series of studies of topographical motifs that Agnes Denes began to produce in the late 1960s. In these works, Denes plays with isometric projection, a method of visually representing three-dimensional objects in the two-dimensional format of a technical sketch. Here, she projects an accurate geographical rendering of the globe onto an unexpected structure—the form of a snail. A longtime advocate for human stewardship of and responsibility for the planet, Denes used this drawing and her other Map Projections to reimagine to earth and the place of humans on it. As she remarked, “longitude and latitude lines were unraveled, points of intersection cut, continents allowed to drift, gravity tampered with [and] earth mass altered.”