Art

David Maisel’s carefully constructed, reality–based photographs chronicle the complex relationships between natural systems and human intervention. His investigative process and project–based practice illuminates the notion of place—through observation of natural phenomenon, the effects of the built environment, and what is revealed by societal detritus. His predominantly large–scaled photographs have demonstrated the physical transformation of the landscape caused by industrial efforts. By implementing an aerial perspective, Maisel observes and abstracts the landscape into photographic evidence that would otherwise be unattainable. In his book Warped Space, the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler speaks of the “paranoiac space of modernism,” a space which is “mutated into a realm of panic, where all limits and boundaries become blurred...” These words come to mind when considering the urban aerial images of Los Angeles and its periphery shown in the Oblivion series. Certain spatial fears seem endemic to the modern metropolis, and Los Angeles defines this term in ways that no other American city can approximate. This amorphous skein of strip malls and gated developments, highway entrance and exit ramps, continues endlessly, without boundary or hierarchy. The images in Oblivion underscore the cyborg nature of the city. Themes of development as a self–generating, self–replicating force that exists outside of nature are encoded in these photographs, which view Los Angeles as both a specific site and as a more generalized condition. The inversion of tonalities in these works is a simple act that de–familiarizes the images. It also references other ways of imaging, like the x–ray, which sees within the structure of an organism or body—or other modes of seeing—like the flickering negative images in an atomic blast, when the shadow world is revealed and released. Maisel’s series Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patient from a state–run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families. The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans. Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial—the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky. Sublimely beautiful, yet disquieting, the enigmatic photographs in Library of Dust are meditations on issues of matter and spirit. Among his concerns with Library of Dust are the crises of representation that derive from attempts to index or archive the evidence of trauma; the uncanny ability of objects to portray such trauma; and the revelatory possibilities inherent in images of such traumatic disturbances. While there are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time, the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and to the souls that occupy them. Inspired by Robert Smithson’s writings on the Great Salt Lake, Maisel embarked upon an aerial survey of this surreal, apocalyptic, and strangely beautiful region. Terminal Mirage examines the periphery of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, including zones of mineral evaporation ponds and macabre industrial pollution covering some 40,000 acres along the shores of the lake. At the Tooele Army Weapons Depot, 900 munitions storage igloos sprawl across the valley floor. With each layer of human intervention, the landscape becomes more complex. Previous scars are covered over, and cycles of negation and erasure expand into a grid system overlaid on the barren lake. From the air, a new map emerges. These depictions of damaged wastelands, where human efforts have eradicated the natural order, are both spectacular and horrifying. Although the photographs evidence the devastation of these sites, they also transcribe interior, psychic landscapes that are profoundly disturbing—for, as otherworldly as the images may seem, they depict shattered realities of our own making. As the artist Robert Smithson stated, “The sense of the earth as a map undergoing disruption leads the artist to the realization that nothing is certain or formal.” Maisel’s work has been the subject of four monographs: The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, 2008), and History’s Shadow (Nazraeli Press, 2011). Maisel’s photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations have been exhibited at Bolinas Art Museum, Bolinas, CA (2003); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2005); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA (2008); Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (2008); California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA (2010); and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM (2004). His works are included in many public collections, such as Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, U.K.; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Maisel lives and works in San Francisco, CA.