Tickled ink The Map Room’s "Soap Opera" BY CHRIS THOMPSON

If he hadn’t also been the man who gave us the microphone, phonograph, and kinetoscope, Thomas Edison would be the forgotten guy who spent untold millions in an unsuccessful attempt at magnetic-ore extraction. He once predicted with great flourish: "Books will soon be obsolete in schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of knowledge with the motion picture."

This quote begins Emily Blair’s artist’s book accompanying her current show "Soap Opera," at Portland’s new exhibition space, the Map Room. The show stages a striking dialogue between the large and small scale, the intimacies of the soul and the interpersonal dramas that lay them bare. Beneath Edison’s quote is a more sedate offering, arranged neatly in a word-bubble floating from Blair’s tiny sketched self-portrait: "Let me tell you what I learned from films in the classroom." As suggested by Blair’s juxtaposed drawings of film stills and their decontextualized nuggets of knowledge, the liberation packaged in Edison’s promise didn’t find its way into public-school film-strip time.

Unmindful of the tape recorder’s droning beat, more or less in sync with the hand of the kid lucky enough to turn the projector, the images floated free from the words, turned into portals into a world beyond the boredom that must, nevertheless, by some strange authoritarian magic, have been unconsciously concentrated into the truisms that Blair’s work handwrites for us — from which the indoctrinated adult mind can never escape: "Venereal disease can kill you" . . . "The decimal system was invented by a man named Dewey" . . .

The opening for "Soap Opera," this past Saturday night, also saw the launch of the Map Room’s new Reading Room, a small library space full of catalogues, monographs, and artists’ books. The Phoenix caught up with the space’s founding director Anna Hepler, an artist and professor at Bowdoin College, to find out more about this dynamic new space, its origins, hopes, and dreams.

Phoenix: What’s the genealogy of the Map Room, and how did it get its name?

Hepler: The space that the reading room was in was the old map room for the Portland Company foundry, established in the 19th century. All blueprints, plans, schematic drawings, came through that room. The foundry made marine steam boilers, parts for freight trains, early automobiles, everything. I love the history of that particular room. It’s so rich with the activity of that place, and that is carried with it in its current role as the reading room.

For a long time I had wanted to start something like the Drawing Center in New York. The Map Room came about because the space that I found, which was a studio space initially, begged to be turned into something more public. So the history of the space, the nature of the space itself, its proximity to the road, all of these factors helped to jumpstart it.

Initially, I’m committed to doing some catalogue for every show, or something more like an artist’s book. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it will document the work in the show, but it will be somehow related to it, such as through artist-made multiples, and so on. Publishing is hugely important to this space. It is a way that work lives on. These publications also serve as a direct link between the exhibition space and the Reading Room.

One of the things I love about publishing — I came to it through encounters with Fluxus and artists’ books — is that it’s such an intimate art form. It’s interactive, private, and yet allows you to tell stories in this explicit but humble way. Works that are displayed on the wall, no matter which kinds, are always declarations, even if their content is sweet and understated. Books allow a different kind of interaction around ideas. The Map Room’s publications are very much driven by the work in its shows; the book can be so subversive and powerful, but also so generous!

Q: The Map Room is exciting because of the way it works at the intersection of a range of print media. What plans do you have for long-term projects and upcoming shows?

A: Our next show is an artist from Boston, Johnny Carrera, who runs the Quercus Press. He is mainly interested in historical methods of printmaking, and in money as printmaking, because it is such a beautiful kind of print. This show will happen in early February, and will be an exhibition of his collages in which he uses money as collage material.

What brings all the artists together that I’m interested in showing is an approach to process and an attitude about mark-making, or storytelling. It has to do with a kind of directness of interaction with materials or with ideas, a freshness that comes from an ability to be honest about one’s expression. I’m also interested in human mark-making more broadly, and I would say that it ricochets in very different ways.

I’m also interested in people coming and browsing. We have resource books for people interested in making ’zines themselves, for example. I love to think we would inspire people to make publications of their own.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"Soap Opera," by Emily Blair, is at the Map Room, in Portland, through Jan. 15, 2004. Call (207) 251-3251.