What does it mean to be a navigator? First, we must ask, is it possible to lead from within the crowd, or to direct the course of a journey when someone else’s hands are at the wheel? If the answer is yes, then to be a good navigator, we need to understand that at all times, we deal with circumstances greater than our control and make decisions with less information than we would like. Yet we still must choose a direction to go and find ways to communicate what we know to others in order for them to listen and follow.

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The Navigators features artists, Jenie Gao, Jaymee Harvey Willms, and Emily Arthur. Their works of art act as tools and guides to navigate our own questions and understanding of identity, culture, and place. Like any other tool or device, art expands upon existing knowledge and abilities. Art has the power to connect different ideas in the same way that maps connect different destinations. So if a journey is the process of arriving at a destination, then creativity is the process of connecting information. A map enables us to explore different routes. Similarly, an artwork enables us to see different possibilities.

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Jenie Gao’s work is like a modern day Aesop, telling stories of human dilemmas and moral qualms. Her drawings and prints feature characters like hybrid “gundogs” with guns for heads and angels and harpies that are virtually indistinguishable from each other aside from their names. Gao’s work emphasizes exactness, detail, and high contrast. The world is depicted as black and white, then selectively colored. Something about the permanence of ink feels decisive and immutable, though the ink is fluid and the images morphing and merging.

Emily Arthur’s prints of native plants and animals become a metaphor for displaced people, a repeating pattern of subjugation to current systems of power. The same systems that treat nature as a decorative backdrop to human activity will also treat people as “less than.” Arthur’s printmaking and research processes are methodical and layered. She studies policies that have forced people out of their homes and animals out of their habitats. She uses her findings to reveal the interdependence between humanity and nature, to connect environment with experience of home.

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Jaymee Harvey Willms creates sculptures and paintings that combine familiar imagery, personal narrative, and everyday objects. Animals and dollhouse furniture are manipulated into the same form, blending and interrupting one another’s identities. The work is a satire that exposes cultural assumptions about gender, sexuality, and power. The creative process itself is aggressive. Harvey Willms uses techniques such as burning and tearing to achieve a desired effect, whether that be confusion around identity or a deeper understanding of how complicated our identities truly are.

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Each artist’s work reveals a strong relationship between process and purpose, the tool and the individual who uses it. Using a map is not a mindless process, but a constant negotiation between what we need to help us find our way and what we want to believe the world looks like. Similarly, art offers its viewers insight into an artist’s mind and to the subject at hand. It is still up to us, the viewers, to decide what to do with that insight.