David Maisel

David Maisel is a visual artist whose body of work called Black Maps comprises aerial photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes. These images have as their subject matter the undoing of the natural world by the wide-scale intervention of human action. The Black Maps project has unfolded in chapters, focusing on such subjects as strip-mines, clear-cuts, leaching fields, tailings ponds, firestorms, the drainage remnants of Owens Lake, and other manipulations of the natural world. These images are meant neither to vilify nor to glorify their content, but rather to expand our notions of what constitutes landscape and landscape art. Maisel is not attempting to make literal records of environmental destruction. Rather he seeks to reveal the landscape in something other than purely visual terms, the photograph transcribing it as an archetypal space of destruction and ruin that mirrors the darker corners of our consciousness.

Maisel’s recent monograph, The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), focuses on aerial images made at the site of Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Beginning in 1913, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct, to bring water to Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid stretch of land. For decades, fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. Indeed, the lakebed has become the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting some 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic and other materials. The concentration of minerals in the remaining water of Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake appear as a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy’s map. The forms of environmental disquiet and degradation are here made to function on both a documentary and a metaphorical level, and the aerial perspective enables one to experience the landscape like a vast map of its own undoing.

Amei Wallach has written about The Lake Project in The New York Times (May 9, 2004):
“ As Mr. Maisel renders it, the lake, which has been drained over the last 90 years to green the lawns and ice the whiskies of Los Angeles, looks scourged and flayed...In Mr. Maisel’s photos, the vistas are majestic, terrifying, and weirdly beautiful. They seem more intimate than microscopic data, vaster than extraterrestrial space.”

James Crump has written in Art Review magazine (October/November 2004):
Maisel’s images of Owens Lake… dispense with the pristine and iconic characteristics of American landscape photography to get at something more terrifying and alien. …Standing before one of his enormous photographs is both an alarming and a strangely seductive experience.”

Vince Aletti has written in Photograph (September/October 2004):
“ In 26 extraordinary aerial views, Maisel turns the alarming specificity of blood-red streams and scab-like erosions into sprawling, sci-fi abstractions, at once marvelous and appalling, that leave the viewer unmoored, lost in space. Against all odds, Maisel’s text is as compelling as his photos: He sees the lake as “a sacred text, in a language we cannot decipher…The lake as loss, the photographs as mourning.”
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Maisel’s photographs have been exhibited by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Museum of Photography, and others, and are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and others. His work has been exhibited in the past year in solo exhibitions at the Von Lintel Gallery, New York; the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles; the Miller Block Gallery, Boston; and the Schneider Gallery, Chicago.