Which, conversely, actually brings me back to maps; navigational tools that summarise, provide information and to an extent, conquer. Mapping is a military reconnaissance mission and a map is a logistical system and potentially, a weapon. The map, the plan, is a birds-eye-view of the city, while the person navigating its innards has a very different, rather more messy experience. Even attempting to trace that journey is just one personal story among the crushing throngs of lives that pass each other everyday. As the attempts of the late twentieth-century ‘psychogeographers’ showed—to whom, not unsurprisingly, many of the exhibitors in Mapping the City owe differing degrees of inspiration—trying to systematise the ground-level experience of urban life into a scientific and objective approach is to create overly confident, artificial categorisations and silence the ongoing narrative of sleepless cities.

Mapping the City is made up of these subjective maps, cartographic art works by 50 street artists from around the world coding and claiming their streets, their underground catacombs, their cycling accidents, their histories and their fictions. To write a review is essentially also to create such a map. I enjoy joining the dots, navigating from work to work, artist to artist, thought to leading thought, tracking mental markers, scribbled notes, all reviewed again while sat at a keyboard and sketched into something that hopefully can be followed. The review is, in some ways like giving the reader my map of the exhibition. Not literally though—you wouldn’t want it. It’s been annotated with weird, dramatic things like “the city is a god”, “payote”, “where is Allessandria?”, “bodies, microchips, gauze”, “tagging” and “Neverware”. Because, of course, like all exhibitions, Mapping the City, has a map. Each work is numbered, running in a sequential snake down the page while a series of colour coded arrows connect piece to piece, and artist to artist by medium and or/theme. On my map, I drew another set of arrows. One runs between number 11 and number 16— 11 being The Book of Bitumen: Chapter One, 2015 and Rubble Trauma Tower, 2012-2015, by Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ and 16 being Gold Peg’s London’s Burning, 2013. A journey between a video of ritual cultists ‘breakspraying’ on layered lino, chanting hip-hop prayers with symbolic, de-soled Addidas trainers strung around their necks, to a dark, autobiographical ‘Where’s Wally?’ map of London, where witches and hell hounds laugh at green vomit spewing hipsters in Shoreditch or toast marshmallows over the head of a three-eyed, tentacled monster clutching Selfridges and Top Shop shopping bags in the hell hole that is Oxford Street. From there my scrawled line navigates to 47, Susumu Mukai’s detailed pencil drawing, Regent’s Canal, East London, 2012-2014, 2014: a map of memory, a map from maps, from drawing, notes and countless navigations. A short hop over then to 50 lands in Will Sweeneys fantastical rendition of Cabott Square, Canary Wharf, 2014 complete with a Bull god, battery farm body enslavement, skull-stacked skyscraper towers in which skeleton men do desk-work and talk on the phone, monsters that slither in the Thames, alien invasions, some truly amazing looking ‘end of the world’ parties and, of course, ceremonial blood sacrifice. I then followed Tim Head’s heady night drive through London to the work of Nug, and Nug and Pike, and the adrenalin pumped performance of the graffiti artist, and a train obsession, to the quiet, lonely Parisian catacombs where Psyckoze has been secretly at work for many years. From here the line heads back up to number 13, to Daniel Gotesson’s Rational Disorder I & II, 2014, an abstract ink and spray paint diptych that channels the psychogeographic spectre that haunts all introspective city wanderings.

So that’s my map of Mapping the City and I hope that in this case, if you get yourself down to Somerset House lickety-split, and with other reviews and exhibitions, you have fun writing, crossing-out and drawing a new map over the top.

Mapping the City is at Somerset House until 15 February 2015, in association with collaborative arts organisation A(by)P.

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As you can read on our About page, until 2013 ArtSelector was a free, online network for artists—a place to share news, opinion, opportunities and promote events, as well as publishing regular reviews and a series of themed editions. The key element of ArtSelector that we are taking forward, beyond being a publishing platform, is the ideal of a critical artist community. ArtSelector is a group of artists and writers (among other things) that, through a written practice and many conversations, online and off, are exploring the role of the arts review. We have different concerns, voices and styles and as our community grows we hope to continue to challenge our assumptions, and yours.

We meet regularly to share ideas and discuss each others writing and are thankful to be supported by Platform Training, a provider of training courses in digital media, who, as well as hosting our online presence, have kindly furnished us with the occasional use of a space at Westland Place Studios, North London. We will be announcing the next meeting soon, so keep an eye out if you would be interested in coming along and potentially joining us as a writer. Also watch this space for news of our upcoming launch event. After all, what’s a launch without a party?

There’s a lot of things we want to do. We hope to be a resource for artists and writers and that interested parties will join us in this effort. We want to address the nature of our status as a non-profit, voluntary enterprise and the ideals, problems, ambitions and possibilities of that, going forward.

But for now, lets just concentrate on the reviews. Happy reading!

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Travel down to the third floor to sit before the looped screening of Ben River’s Creation As We Saw It, 2012 and look up: you’ll see the colourful, elephant-faced undercarriage of The Three Fold Law. Drained a little of its bright variety by the silvery ambience in the room, it nevertheless retains the characteristically kaleidoscopic quality of Harper’s painting: tunnel-visions through mutating organic forms, some natural, some imaginary. Smaller works by Harper can be peered at—sadly from quite a distance—in the adjacent stair well. Abloom and fading, the disorientating detail of the vivid, butterfly-print images of buds, branches, creeping stems and vegetable rot seem to keep metamorphosing into Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits, tribal masks and hollowing animal craniums. Creation as we see it.

River’s film tells us sweet, sad creation stories over scenes of modern day life: a modern day that is a combined world of the old and the new, ancient and modern. Using purposefully archaic technology, Rivers’ hand-developed, 16mm film silently narrates the myth of a volcano’s birth on the island of Tanna of the Republic of Vanuatu, the bringing of fire and the beginnings of human life in one of the worlds oldest known settlements. A lasting interest in the forgotten secrets, the mothers of myth in pre-history appears to be the curational topic at hand, yet it is a messy, indiscriminate wealth of time that flows throughout the exhibition, overlaying the contemporary with the historical. A time before time becomes a forever present; something we reach behind the scenes for, underneath, digging fingernails into the basal mess. Time is just another ambiguous construct alongside the real and the imaginary, consciousness facing the ambivalence of the natural world.

The amorality of nature—the disinterested, essential and unifying force at work in many of the included artists work—underpins River’s interest in alternative ways of living that are neither utopia not dystopia; totally ordinary yet remarkable places. Often filming exceptional individuals or singular communities, Rivers is drawn to places that are distinctively authored and shaped by the people he films, documenting the reality and the possibilities of our fictions. Camera led, eyes rest on close up portraits of the island’s contemporary inhabitants—a boy rides a bike in circles; bare shoulder blades open and close as man claps—he swings his arms, unheard and walks along a tree-shaded path; another, older man, masticates in the doorway of his house, trying not to laugh self-consciously under his hat. Inter-cut by the fable of pig and man, their exchange of limbs, short and long, a woman rubs the belly of a blissful, dusty hog. In another shot, the curious curl of a human toe nested above the other detracts attention from the animal skull that hangs above the foot. Picking out detail within disarray; depicting creation as we see it.

Primordial or post-apocalyptic landscapes or both, strange fictions, organic and geological, continue to evolve throughout the exhibition: places bound by natural forms yet authored, manipulated and mythologised. Journeying further down towards the centre of the earth, the second floor displays sculptural specimens from the veins of volcanoes, the fungal growths and sedimentary build-up of wet caverns, and the pulsating ocean floor. Salvatore Arancio’s ceramics gasp hot, guttural names like Ah-ah, 2015 or the electronic rhythm of Ziwzih Ziwzih Oo-oo-oo, 2012; are called after tiny ancient crustaceans, living fossils such as Triop, 2005; or simply state their form as in Holes, 2015—sea-bottom calcite tubers popping open to extend modelling compound limbs. A graphic photo-etching on the wall states its subject: An active volcano summit in the valley of stones, 2011. While Arancio’s work dominates the room, the odd pairing with Caroline Achaintre textile work is less peculiar than it first appears. I can imagine them both pouring through books for curious images, editing and combining and elaborating their sources to create hybrid objects. The man-made fuses with the natural in Arancio’s sculptures, reinterprets found images using a combinations of new and ‘outdated’ techniques in his etchings, while geometric ink blots on printed paper transform natural geologies into something synthetic and strange. Achaintre’s woolen zebra pelt, Zibra, 2011, is a similarly re-sourced modern exoticism: the animal pattern crafted into an angular geometry of hand-tufted wool, zigzags of blue and gold invading the black and white regulation in a dramatic, and slightly absurd, combined order. Creation as we make it.

Down, down on the ground floor, or the first floor, at the beginning and the end ,is another seemingly odd coupling between Jack Strange and Vidya Gastaldon. As much as Strange is sincere in his humour, poking fun at and through visual manipulations—how we visualise ourselves and our relation to the world around us through things, including art—Gastaldon has humour in her sincerity. Her allegorical drawings, inspired by sacred Hindu texts, are littered with pop references and drug culture, not least the acid smiley—a contemporary payote for the modern day mystic. Said by the artist to represent a non-duality or cosmic unity of good and evil, Gastaldon’s pale drawings hatch within papery voids like planets being born, cells growing in a Petri dish or terrine-like bubble worlds, evolving microcosms living and dying in the vastness of the universe. The elephant within Ulephant, 2006, is revealed in particulates of rock formations and tree-trunks, serially blossoming within the landscape: mountains and planet strewn skies divided by a horizon line that delves into a subterranean world. In Fire and Emptiness Flight, 2008, both ghostly spirits seem essential to the other, creating space underneath a densely buried but bejewelled cosmos. Such apocryphal binds of creation and destruction trail thematically throughout the The First Humans and yet, as in Gastaldon’s work, these binaries are subsumed by an overpowering ambivalence between them, like the entangled symmetry of Harper’s painting or the tragic birth of a volcano that forms the world: the dualism of beauty and decadence, life and death, utopia and dystopia, the sardonic or knowingly cliché, and a true, mystical sincerity. Ambiguity trickles down the inside of this re-purposed, post-industrial pillar like good-natured laughter.

There are a just lot of eyes in this first/last room, looking, grinning, laughing. From the spirits sketched in pencil and graphite in Gastaldon’s watercolour bled drawings to Strange’s series of paired tumble stones, each inserted into rectangular cardboard sheets, a deadpan host of level gazes from the back wall. Entitled, What do you want more of? (I)–(XXIII), 2010, each stone is supposedly imbued with different desirable characteristics. They remind me of birth stone earrings piercing cardboard backing in a craft shop: material, objects, on which to project ourselves and our meaning on, or take some meaning from and award it to ourselves. How easily manipulated have I been by the work in this psychedelic exhibition? Seeing faces, gods, archetypal myths, an exotic state of nature (neither Edens, utopias nor disinterested dystopias), and exotic, carnival incarnations: documented fictions of the pre-historical and primitive. The confounding cliché of creation as we see it, as we see ourselves in relation to the world: aliens, apes, cavemen—the bizarre characters that Strange rattles around dressed up as inside Lump Inside a Lump, 2012, a video set into a clumsy papier-mâché boulder.

On entering the Pump House, the wall text directs your thoughts downwards before you journey up through the four rooms of the exhibition, asking you to think about the grounds of London, the fertile muck of time and the swampy land that once was—that which fuelled the defunct power station nearby, a site currently undergoing phase of moneyed, metropolitan development and property speculation —from the equally repurposed art gallery in a city park. There is a hint of JG Ballard’s alternative Londons; psychedelic journeys through the looking glass of modern urbanity where civilisation becomes entwined with the primordial and we catch sight of ourselves growing, dripping with it, acting within a transformational landscape. Authored landscapes in metamorphosis. Creation as we see it, as we over-write it, as we see ourselves, at the beginning and the end: the first humans.

The First Humans is at Pump House Gallery from the 22 January until 27 March 2015.

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