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Ficus Interfaith: Zones and projections

NEW YORK — Tower 49 Gallery is pleased to present Zones and Projections by the collaborative team Ficus Interfaith (Ryan Bush and Raphael Martinez-Cohen), a two-part exhibition about the uncertainties and inadequacies of humankind’s attempts to grapple with the four dimensions of physical reality. 

The exhibition is free and open to the public in the street-level lobby spaces and the 24th floor Sky Lobby of Tower 49, 12 East 49th Street, New York.

The ground-floor installation features seven large terrazzo paintings, each in the shape of a historic map projection (Dymaxion, Goode Homolosine, Eckert IV, Cahill Butterfly, Werner, Mercator, Spilhaus) that depicts the globe in wildly divergent and frankly inaccurate ways. The New York Times has described the artists’ approach to terrazzo as “Roman mosaics by way of Brooklyn,” underscoring their street-smart grittiness. But unlike mosaics, which are built up with tiny bits of glass, tile, and other materials known as tesserae, turning them into an aggregate of glittering details, terrazzo is poured like cement, which the artists manipulate like hyper-thick coats of paint. Once it dries, they grind the textured surface down in search of a resonant image. 

The innate unwieldiness of the medium makes it antithetical to the precision required of a cartographer; rather than delineating coastlines and mountain ridges, the terrazzo oozes, shifts, and submerges the artists’ careful designs into freewheeling abstractions—an effect that plays directly into their conception of maps not as navigational guides, but as documents of
uncertainty, subjectivity, and political, social,
and cultural distortions.

Each of the seven map projections that act as templates for the artworks, including such well-known examples as the Mercator projection, used for 16th-century seafaring as well as GPS maps, and the Dymaxion projection developed by Buckminster Fuller, is itself a distortion resulting from the attempt to depict a sphere in two dimensions, much in the same way that clocks, with their lockstep precision, are a distortion of both Einstein’s understanding of the relativity of time and our personal perception of time’s elastic pace. 

In the Sky Lobby, past a terrazzo painting of a sunflower  hanging in the entrance corridor, the artists have installed thirty-eight clocks under the title “Universal Coordinated Time”, which is the politically negotiated term for Greenwich Mean Time (resolving a dispute between England and France). While each of the thirty-eight clocks represents a real time zone, the irony is that only twenty-four time zones are needed to track the alteration of night and day across the globe. The array of clocks is a graphic display of the social and political forces that have distorted the actuality of time with the human desire to use it as a tool for trade, industry, and power. 

Ryan Bush (b.1990, Denver, CO) and Raphael Martinez-Cohen (b.1989, New York, NY) have been collaborating as Ficus Interfaith since 2013. The name Ficus Interfaith (described in the project’s Wikipedia page as a reference to the “fig tree genus and the allure of spirituality”) is an epigram crystallizing the artists’ dual interest in the known and unknown. Based in Queens, New York, Ficus Interfaith has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and has participated in group shows across the US as well as in Toronto and London, along with residencies in California, Japan, and New York.