Old maps already bare a mysterious beauty unaltered, but with a total reinterpretation, Matthew Cusick breathes new life into them. The pictures above are a few of my favorites from his Map Works and Constellations collections. Each one is masterfully crafted from maps and little else, worlds away from any collage you made in grade school.
And speaking of grade school, below are a few pages torn from Cusick's "Defacements" collection, in which he tears pages from old schoolbooks and strips them of everything but a page number, an illustration and a few well-chosen words. These instantly captivated me as they are so simple and simultaneously complex- they had me laughing and they had me thinking. Full of double entendres, some seem to carry a message about a deep societal issue and a (somewhat childish) joke.
In an interview with Live Fast Mag, Cusick said of these pages, "The voice behind the Defacements is that of a smart-ass 5th grader who is possessed by an oracle, acting like a shaman, and trying to be a poet."
All images from mattcusick.com, click here to see the rest of his work.
