CUT / PASTE: Ripples

Hydrosocial Stories: Water and Society through Art and Science

May 7, 2025

Native American Student and Community Center | Portland State University

Photo by Thien-Kim Bui

Cut / Paste: Ripples is a selection of map collages that addresses how water shapes people and their environments that was exhibited at the Hydrosocial Stories: Water and Society through Art and Science mini-conference held at Portland State University's Native American Student and Community Center on May 7, 2025.

Some of the pieces speak directly to current events, such as Banis and Bui’s The Map Is Not The Territory. Other pieces take a playful and imaginative look at how water shapes physical environments, such as Beck and Heatherly’s The Storied Oregon Isles or Ferrell’s Multnomah’s Visionary Scenic Rivers. Still other pieces explore people’s intimate relationships with and through water, such as Kellogg’s In Search of Home, Rudick’s The Basin of Reverie, and Finley’s Boats are holes in the water you throw money into.

Fundamentally, all maps are an abstraction: they simplify reality and offer incomplete narratives. By reducing maps to their symbolic elements, removing the original context, and then reassembling these elements into new narratives, the artists offer insights into their perceptions and understandings of water and place, including their feelings, prejudices, and memories. All of the map collages in this exhibition disregard conventions, challenge dominant narratives, or comment on political or social issues.

Thien-Kim Bui and David Banis, May 2025

ARTIST STATEMENTWhen is the Gulf of Mexico not the Gulf of Mexico?

ARTIST STATEMENTThis piece began as an attempt to chart a place I visit often in dreams—a landscape that returns again and again, familiar yet just beyond grasp. I set out to map it, but the process led me elsewhere. Drawn to the braided rivers, oxbow curves, and pastel hues of dusty topographic maps, I followed the terrain as it unfolded on its own terms.Water, like dreams, is ephemeral—always shifting, impossible to hold. Both resist being mapped, yet leave traces that shape the land and the self. In that spirit, the basin that emerged—dendritic, meandering, and slightly fantastical—became a different kind of geography. A place I didn’t quite recognize, but felt compelled to explore. Near the end, I discovered a real lake named Rachel Lake, quietly nested within a Snoqualmie Forest map. I placed it at the center, not just for the name that I share with it, but for the feeling it gave: of quiet invitation to explore the inner terrain.The Basin of Reverie is both an imagined cartography and a personal terrain. A place that invites internal exploration, where memory, fantasy, and geography blur like the edges of a dream.

ARTIST STATEMENTThis collage was inspired from my own life-long journey of trying to find "home" -- geographically, culturally, internally, and community-wise. The whale and the orca with her baby symbolize this journey, across oceans and between land masses and past danger. Just like myself, unbeknownst to them, are the currents of life that they are following and being supported with. Perhaps these currents are home -- the transitions, the uncertainty, the new places and faces, etc. It is a question I ponder. This is the theme of the collage. Are you in search of home as well?

ARTIST STATEMENTAs the artist I grabbed onto the idea of making a map collage that consisted of mostly fictitious ideas. With the original map consisting of Multnomah County and a snapshot of Portland from a bird's eye view, it became the outline representing the only trace of reality. Representing a vast green and blue landscape of vegetation, flowing rivers and wildlife, it's a display of tranquility with humans and nature cohabitating together. My thought was to create a dreamy vision of how life could have been with the city landscape minimized to a couple small homes, airplanes and a few structures of modernization intertwined in the greenery. Nothing about the map is accurate other than the rivers. Anyone can observe the collage pieces have been robbed from other locations which adds to the humorous divide of make-believe and reality. Maybe it's like playing I-Spy, and my intention is to create curiosity.

ARTIST STATEMENTThis map explores the intersection of human infrastructure and water. The roads are a skeleton over which the water flows; there is water above and water below. Beneath the water lay memories of landscapes past and dreams of landscapes yet to come. Compass roses from nautical maps respond to unknown magnetisms and contradict each other. Are we looking at a disaster, or an opportunity? The map refuses to answer.

David Banis, Tributaries of Fluvial Civilization, 2025. Groundwater maps, resource management maps, road maps, tourist maps, flood maps, National Geographic maps, other maps. 28 x 22 inches. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.

ARTIST STATEMENTBoundaries and centers, meanders and channels, industry and agriculture, transport and habitat, scenic and polluted, free-flowing and dammed (damned?), then and now. All that complexity, always symbolized with shades of blues I’ve only seen on maps.

ARTIST STATEMENTBodies of water are often defined by their shore lines, and while the Monterey Bay and Manhattan shorelines are visible in this piece, they are defined in terms of negative space, highlighting the water instead. In making this piece I was thinking of how class and access to water intersect, especially in areas with high living costs like New York City and around California's Monterey Bay. While my grandfather loved boats, the title of this piece was one of his favorite lines. He and my grandmother spent many years involved in projects with the goal of democratizing access to water as a path to greater appreciation of the natural world.

ARTIST STATEMENTThe Oregon Coastline is a landform revered by many, but what if long term geological processes had created islands in addition? This map tackles this concept by creating islands that are entirely imagined and consider the social, economic, political potential, as well as the depicted geographic differences such landforms may have offered. The islands provide an exciting landscape upon which lie complex stories, being composed of different soil types, varying topologies, and discrete references - all sorts of different map types imposed into this one work of fiction. Next time you make a map, take a moment to think about the "what could be" and come up with your own storied isles!

Instagram Story by Follow the Water

Follow the Water on Instagram: "Follow the Water attended Hydro Social Stories at the PSU Native American Student and Community Center, a mini-conference focused on the theme Water and Society. We spoke with Dr. Alida Cantor and Melissa Haeffner and explored research and art from PSU students and faculty across disciplines—highlighting how water shapes our communities and future. Thanks to PSU for making space for these conversations 💧 @alidacantor @portlandstate @pdxclas @psu_nascc"

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