Kyle Butler's recent work Map of Dead Ends, Buffalo NY was a prompt for this installation at Rochester Contemporary Art Center. This installation is presented as part of Points of Departure: Meditations on Mapping curated by Colleen Buzzard and Karen Sardisco.

The map of dead ends is a prompt toward making; extracted, literal ends providing the visual structure for new work. Taking the form of a tool that typically guides movement through space, this map isolates the circumstances where passage is not possible. In the broad sense, it is a work about resignation to limits or perseverance despite them.

More specifically, the work acts as a generative process of design that nods to Parametricism, a supposed new paradigm in architecture and planning that seems to have the same utopian pitfalls as all new paradigms. In making the map, I found myself forming subjective criteria for what constituted an end (Is this too overgrown and derelict to still be a road? Is this more of a driveway than an end? Does this path count as an outlet?). Ultimately, the end had to be a place in its own right or a charismatic terminus to place. - K.B.