In the early 1980s, sound artist and composer Annea Lockwood followed the Hudson River from its source in upstate New York to the Atlantic Ocean, making field recordings at various points along its path. The resulting installation, A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1982), may be the first piece that symbolically and successfully reunites field recordings with their geographic origins.

Since then many artists have followed Lockwood's path. Locally, Perri Lynch's superb 2003 installation Precisely Known Completely Lost juxtaposed field recordings with photographs of King County survey markers. In Lynch's installation, distinct visual and aural components formed an elegant, unexpected whole; looking engendered listening (as in "Does that really sound like that?") while listening abetted looking, conferring a sense of place upon those small bronze disks embedded in streets and sidewalks.

Tania Kupczak's installation Maps&Legends looks and sounds like a promising rough draft. A crudely cut continent coated in Liquid Paper white paint dominates an otherwise all-black room. Close up, the utterly black carpet suggests a sea of nylon-coated caviar. Three suspended speakers intone Kupczak's journal entries while in an aloof corner, distant and regrettably incongruent banjo plucking coupled with what seems like handbone thigh-slapping swells and recedes. The room is otherwise barren.

Indeed, Maps&Legends is too empty, too undefined. It takes more than a continental outline and haphazard readings ("...a spell for armor and protection...") to poetically stake out territory. As a listener and watcher, I felt no connection between the topographic contours of Kupczak's continent and her voice. Borders result not from a foggy, vaporous absence, but foam up out of the roiling presence of people, things, and passions that threaten the falsely vacant neatness of a map. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI

Maps&Legends runs through Fri Dec 30 at Jack Straw Productions, 4261 Roosevelt Way NE, 634-0919, Mon–Fri 9–6 pm, free.