Stripping the streets

We trust maps for their truth and rely on their universal symbolism to orientate our lives. They have charted previously unknown worlds and endowed their new colonisers their status (as do NASA's satellite photos today). The abstract landscapes of our internal maps are not so reliable, but they hold the key to our imagination and identity.

In this second Maps exhibition, curator Jane England invites us on "a trail through real and imagined geography". Our guides are 40 international artists who plot the journey in a variety of media.

Tracey Emin presents a typically simple, personal statement with wide political implications: an anti-war poem scrawled over a map of the Middle East. Cornelia Parker handles threat from a different quarter in her 2001 Meteorite series, dropping melted meteor metal onto maps of obscure American towns.

Closer to home, Alberto Duman's View of Westbourne Grove, London, acknowledges the gallery's fashionable W11 location and reduces the street's contents to a poem constructed from printed name tags. Across town, the Jerwood Prize (Drawing) winner Adam Dant represents Shoreditch as Globe, in quirky islands.

Maps are constantly changed to fit new political realities and here Layla Curtis's World Political switches countries around to produce potentially nightmarish new neighbour relations.

The London A-Z comes in for some heavy dismemberment, too. Jason Wallis-Johnson's abstracts float dissected streets in space, isolated from the landmarks which gave them their meaning.

Georgia Russell's shredded A-Z for The Knowledge is displayed under a Victorian bell jar, the metropolis trapped in an airless, timeless vacuum. Chris Kenny's meticulously excised streets in the abstract, Street Drawing II reveals influence of Mondrian - and grids which could never work.

This subject is rich to mine. For the viewer, the works trigger and expel images from one's personal psychogeography with exhilarating results.