1998

Site specific installation with video at the Castellani Art Museum, Niagara Falls, New York, map size 20' x 20'

In this piece, perceptions of space, more specifically our relationships to "majestic" places such as Niagara Falls, are dealt with through manipulations of scale and representation. A 20 x 20 foot road map of the Americas hangs on the gallery wall with a   4" video monitor inset at the site of Niagara Falls. The viewer must use the binoculars hanging from the gallery ceiling - above an observation platform - in order to see the tiny images on the monitor. The video shows images of the Falls, and tourists viewing, photographing and videotaping the great spectacle.

Here is what the Buffalo News Art Critic Richard Huntington wrote in his review of the exhibition Niagara :

"A number of the contemporary artists here ingeniously play on the tendency of art to inadvertently diminish the majesty of the Falls.

A prime example is the big installation All Roads Lead to Niagara . Burke Paterson has assembled road maps - retaining the relative size of the states - to make a huge disjointed map of North and South America. The Falls is comically represented by a small video monitor fitted into the map, to be viewed from a real platform built in the gallery. The work, so big yet so trivializing, beautifully parallels the typical tourists displaced experience of the Falls"