Veronica Graham's exhibit at CellSpace is in the mode of a particular strain of contemporary art activity: the handmade simulation of an industrial artifact. Bonus Map covers the exhibition space with nearly 2,000 silkscreened cloth tiles, each roughly four inches square. The tiles are repetitions of perhaps 20 or so images, in the vernacular of landscape. The overall effect is of patterned wallpaper.

The title Bonus Map comes from video games: the constructed topographies that aren't included in the initial release, expanding the game's territory of play. In her artist statement, Graham namechecks "The Legend of Zelda" and "The Secret of Mana," but the digital reference points are muted by the recessive colors (mellow blues and browns) and by the style of the images, which echo Japanese woodblock prints and decorative painting on knick-knacks. Bonus Map feels "digital" in the way that needlepoint can be evaluated as a prototype for pixel art.

Graham's "wallpaper," being handmade and modular, is able to be more organic in its patterning than factory-made wallpaper. The landscape vignettes themselves draw from a variety of perspectives and proximities: some are birds-eye views, some are frontal or side views, some are at the scale of a stand of trees, some zoom in to a cluster of pinecones.

One particularly appealing device is the construction of long meandering rivers out of two prints of top-down views of water, one running straight and one with a curve. By linking and turning these tiles, Graham has made snaking waterways that wiggle diagonally through the grid, like sections of digressive pipework making arabesques from novel combinations of straight sections and elbows. Sometimes at the end of one of these aerial-view runs, the next tile shows a river wending through a ravine, disappearing toward a horizon line, or a cluster of ducks set against decorative ruffles of waves. The disjunctive POVs are equalized by the logic of the grid and the adhesion of pattern.

The contiguous coherency of macro and micro (magnified snowflakes set next to shrunken cloud formations) and the pseudo-cubist fragmenting of locale (as though all these views were sliding across the turning facets of a crystal with planes that manage to be perpendicular to the third dimension) give one a feeling of mastery over the space. The spectator's eye becomes godlike, not bound by stereoscopy, able to take in multiple aspects of the world in one blink, laid out into one plan. The world is your Rubik's cube.

This mastery is also transparently delusional. Ornamental wallpaper--at least the sort that traffics in floral design--evokes a peculiar form of nostalgia, the type that brings into focus precisely what it denies. Floral wallpaper is an obstruction that's been clothed as a portal. If Bonus Map doesn't quite propose infinite space bound in a nutshell, it proposes at least an ecosystem bound in one--and the nutshell is a device of our own making, whether it's composed of sheetrock or of luminous pixels. It plays with the pleasure we take in the illusion of space spreading out farther and farther before us, while the actuality of space closes us in.

Bonus Map was on view at CELLspace May 1-25, 2008.