Meat Market Gallery

In Meet Me At The Mason Dixon, a solo exhibition by Lisa Blas presented at Meat Market Gallery, the Mason-Dixon line is the framework for overlapping narratives about a presidential assassin, an actress turned wartime collaborator, a West Point officer killed near Najaf, and the artist herself. This multimedia installation will be on view from March 7 – March 30.

Surveyed in the 1760s by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the Mason-Dixon line determined portions of the borders of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia (then part of Virginia). In the nineteenth century, the term referred to the boundary between free and slave states. In the twenty-first century, it continues to stand for cultural divisions within the American landscape.

Blas, a Corcoran faculty member, relocated from Los Angeles to Washington in 2003 to conduct the research on which this ongoing work is based, visiting archives, museums, battlefields, and other sites where memory is, in her words, preserved, erased, and reconstructed. Nomadism, which she defines as the opposite of tourism, is a key component of her process.

At Meat Market the artist recreates a dense wall of maps and ephemera collected on her travels, including flags, brochures, newspaper clippings, ribbons, and family mementos. Originally occupying a wall of her studio in Mount Rainier, Maryland, this piece illuminates the connection between identity and national heritage, locality and current events. The gallery space is shared by portrait paintings of her subjects, and photographs that re-contextualize objects of cultural and historical value.

This layered environment of image/object/text represents the material nature of time and storytelling. By keeping the identities of her subjects ambiguous, Blas invites--or, perhaps, provokes--the viewer to become a participant in her search for personal and collective origins. As one moves through the installation, a strand of autobiography gradually becomes visible. Meet Me At The Mason Dixon is an invitation to wander the borders of representation, historical record, and the “American experience.”