For most of her artistic career, Jill Pope’s paintings have embraced the movement between time and place by making use of maps, both actual and imagined, to depict and describe an otherwise unattainable landscape.

Maps are used to define and direct us to a destination. We accept maps as factual and permanent, yet they are subjective, open for interpretation, and inclined to change over time. Maps are merely tools to aid us on a journey; they lend substance and structure to otherwise aimless meanderings.

In her paintings, Pope joins personally charged iconography with layers and sections of actual maps. Most recently, adapting these visual aids and materials to address the atrocities taking place in Darfur, Sudan.

“Flower Failure” for example refers, in large part, to the failure of the Western world to prioritize this seven-year-old crisis and put an end to it. It combines, and overlaps, maps and landscapes from the region: an unclassified State Department map of the burned out and burning Sudanese villages as well as varied perspectives of intact villages, all of which are overshadowed by a gaudy, ostentatious bejeweled pendant.

“Flower Failure” is intended to be complicated in its symbolism and beautiful in its fluidity, luring the viewer in to confront an often-overlooked reality: those who have nothing: no home, and no safety.