http://www.allanmccollum.net/allanmcnyc/index.html

"The earth's surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other—one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects, or what I will call 'abstract geology'." - This is the opening sentence of Robert Smithson's "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," Artforum Vol. 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 44. Smithson used the wording "abstract geology" and "material maps" in this essay, variant thinking on the artistic union of perceptual and conceptual, or material and abstract registers of experience of his better known theory of the Nonsite.

"And these are big states, as you discovered. What really is the crux here is that there are two projects, the one that created the art works on display in the front gallery and the distribution project documented in the back gallery. They’re really different, and it seems to me that they really represent two different worlds: the art world and the real world. One of the things you are perhaps exposing here is the artificiality of the art world, and making us actually long for more contact with the real world – the world of a rented van on a highway and the county historical society with a stuffed buffalo and dinner at a local restaurant with the local people, and seeing the countryside. That’s something that no work of art, however wonderful, can really capture, or convey." - interview with the artist, discussing the project: A Map of the Divide by David Cateforis

"It’s fascinating to me that these political, geological constructs can be so strangely internalized" - Allan Mccollum

a fable about an empire that produces a map, the map is so detailed that it physically covers the empire, as the empire decays so does the map as it starts to decay these fragments become indistinguishable the ageing double becomes confused with the real thing