Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Favorite Site Tuesdays: Studio KMO


This week's featured site is Studio KMO by Karen M. O'Leary, and I am in awe of her incredibly beautiful work. Put simply, she takes regular, rather boring paper maps of cities and she turns them into spiderwebs of cutwork, revealing the artistry in the everyday.



We almost never get to see the cities we live in like this; maybe in a plane, perhaps on television, but these delicate latticework cuts show the complex beauty in our streets and parks and rivers, something we come to take for granted.



After the fire in 1871, Chicago was completely redesigned, and there is no better way to look at the orderly gridwork that became the Second City. I love that it almost resembles a circuit board.


Karen also does incredibly lovely line drawings of cities, filling the negative space with black ink lines as though a giant hand laid a paper down over the entire place and made a rubbing.

Check out Studio KMO; her work is truly amazing. I'm thinking of commissioning a Chicago mapcut before I leave, as a reminder of where I came from, and where I will always come back to.

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