Cynthia Daignault: Light Atlas
September 20, 2025 – February 8, 2026
In 2014, artist Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978, Baltimore, MD) traveled around the entire outside border of the United States, stopping roughly every twenty-five miles to paint the view before her. She spent roughly nine months alone in her Dodge Ram pickup on back roads and smaller highways to drive the perimeter of the US, pulling over to sketch and photograph the view out her window. After the journey, she returned to her Los Angeles studio to translate her drawings and photographs into finished oil paintings. The resulting work, Light Atlas (2014–2017), is a monumental portrait of the land she encountered in 360 canvases, one that reveals slow shifts in weather patterns; atmosphere; economy; and the impact of development on the land.
Like her past projects—she has painted the sky every day for a year, an outdoor clock at every hour, and the same view of trees for forty days and nights, Daignault makes a vibrant case for painting as means of documentation at a moment when photographs are in endless supply. A portrait of a moment in time and a calendar of memory, Light Atlas (2014–2017) is as much about what has been left out as what is there. The 360 canvases echo the 360 degrees of a circle, offering us a poignant way to understand the unit of measurement by which we measure our life.