Karen Tocatly

Karen Tocatly

I decided that I wanted to try and depict what is a significant segment of the square to me from the angle that seems most familiar: the start of my journey from home to school. This immediately clarified to me my immense blind spots regarding the route I trudge through every day: I was able to immediately “fill in” the details of important landmarks (e.g., the commercial building facing my home; the psychology building) – and could vaguely imagine the relative geographical relationships amongst these buildings – but had absolutely no sense of the location and aesthetics of the many other objects and streets between them. Thus, my first challenge was finding an approximate way to depict the key locations I had imagined “at large” and from a particular perspective/point in time, but I was thereafter more concerned by the many blank spaces that still remained: My sketch looked sterile and exaggeratedly suburban (conjuring up Celebration, Florida), and so I tried to add grungy details and guess at the location of some narrower roads – therefore sacrificing factual precision for an overall more “accurate” characterization. When I looked at Google Maps, I realized that I had missed numerous major streets and landmarks in my sketch, as well as the complex angles of those that I did include. I think this accentuates the overwhelming and limiting subjectivity of one’s perspective of his or her city: I had emphasized minute details (a menu on a storefront) while missing entire roads and buildings. Perhaps, for laypeople, residing in a city inevitably taints our knowledge of this place – as we succumb to the selective salience of daily living.