collections

A.V. Rankin’s research-based practice examines how humans observe, represent, and locate themselves within a changing world. Drawing on cartography, astronomy, and the history of visual knowledge, Rankin develops interconnected bodies of work that investigate relationships among perception, place, and scale.

From expansive world maps and celestial paintings to intimate drawings and watercolors, the work moves between direct observation and phenomena understood through scientific images, data, and inherited conventions. A coastal landscape, a continental outline, and a distant nebula each become a site for considering how information becomes image, and how images shape our understanding of reality.

Across these investigations, material processes remain central. Layering, erasure, collage, and shifts in color and orientation bring abstract systems into physical, human terms. Together, these works form an evolving inquiry into the ways we inhabit, interpret, and imagine our place within larger ecological and cosmic systems.