Amsterdam in 3-D

Matthew Picton

Related Content

• Cafe Flora's Spring Nettle Ravioli with Cashew Cream Sauce: No Cream, No Butter (Believe it!)
  April 4, 2012
• West Seattle Trader Joe's and Central District's The Neighbor Lady to Debut Friday the 13th
  April 3, 2012
• Ear Supply: Like Clusters of Grapes
  October 19, 2011
• Opening Nights: Don Quixote
  February 8, 2012
• Lauren Weedman
  May 9, 2012

More About

• Matthew Picton
• Amsterdam
• Jerusalem

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

London-born Oregon artist Matthew Picton is a mapmaker, charting cities by waterway, road, and train. He creates lush overlays of wandering lines with a very organic, sketchlike hand. Crafted out of Dura-Lar (plastic sheeting similar in texture to Mylar) and pinned to foam core, his sculptures are technically accurate charts, while evoking a sense of possibility. All the routes by which to traverse a city are laid out before you, an offering to the hopeful tourist (or the nostalgic traveler), perhaps. Tucked into the back room at Howard House is Picton's 3-D depiction of Amsterdam, its concentric train tracks pinned in red above the blue canals, curving around the gray streets and what appear to be yellow trolley lines. These physical mappings evoke a city's circulatory system, as well as the wanderings of a person on foot, or maybe, in this case, by boat. Amsterdam's network of canals provides its own system of travel, with the squared-off corners of manufactured waterways connecting to the curvier, somewhat less contained, urban rivers. Picton creates an immediate visual history of this beautiful old city, using what appears to be purely factual shorthand to chart layers of construction and travel. A similar map of Jerusalem, tracing the city's ethnic and religious populations in 1938, 1962, and 2007, illustrates the political shifting of physical facts. When I stopped by, this piece was on its way to Miami, as so much of Seattle's top art is right now. If it doesn't get snatched up at Aqua Art (just one of the several Miami art fairs with Seattle galleries represented), you might get a chance to see this piece again in late December. Howard House, 604 Second Ave., 256-6399, www.howardhouse.net.