David Maisel: Apocalyptic / Sublime

  • In his carefully constructed, reality-based photographs, artist David Maisel stages careful investigations that use unexpected perspectives to make the invisible visible — in landscapes transformed by industrialization or urbanization, or in our artifacts and memories of the past. Central throughout his works are themes of memory, excavation and transformation, of how we perceive our place on Earth or in time, and what we leave behind as a society.

  • “David Maisel’s photographs derive their effectiveness through formal choices involving color, scale, perspective, and abstraction, which amplify their seductive nature and conjure the elusive sublime.”

    Natasha Egan, Executive Director, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, IL
  • For four decades, Maisel has chronicled the complex relationships between natural systems and the built environment. Encompassing documentary and aesthetic...

    David Maisel

    The Mining Project (Clifton, AZ 7), 1989

    48 x 48 inches, edition of 5 + 2 AP: $26,000

    29 x 29 inches, edition of 10 + 2 AP: $14,000

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    For four decades, Maisel has chronicled the complex relationships between natural systems and the built environment. Encompassing documentary and aesthetic perspectives in equal measure, his powerful aerial photographs are abstract and graphic, exquisitely colored and painterly — a strange beauty born of environmental degradation.

     

    Maisel first began photographing open pit mines from the air in the mid-1980s, intrigued by the transformation of the American landscape by extractive industries. The Mining Project (1989) considers sites such as the Morenci Mine in Arizona and Berkeley Pit in Montana, the latter a former copper mine whose impact was felt long after its 1982 closure. 

  • Desolation Desert (2018), created with the support of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, focuses on the massive copper and lithium mining operations in the vast territory of Chile’s Atacama Desert. Maisel’s images of the American West and the Atacama counter a collective misapprehension of the desert as a terra incognita, a vast emptiness upon which we impose a notion of purity.

  • “My photographs are intended to give visual form to the disquieting relationship between contemporary humanity and the Earth, between consumer and consumed.”

  • The Lake Project comprises images from Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California that has...

    David Maisel

    The Lake Project 24, 2002

    48 x 48 inches, edition of 5 + 2 AP: $24,000

    29 x 29 inches, edition of 10 + 2 AP: $12,000

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    The Lake Project comprises images from Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California that has been depleted since 1926, after the Owens River was diverted to bring water to Los Angeles, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid landscape. Fierce winds have created carcinogenic dust storms, while concentrated minerals in the remaining water yield blooms of microscopic bacteria, turning the liquid a deep, visceral red. 

     

    Maisel first photographed Owens Lake in 2001-2002, and returned in 2015 to document how the intervening years had transformed the lakebed.

  • Inspired by the artist Robert Smithson's writings, Terminal Mirage examines the periphery of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, including the mineral evaporation ponds and industrial pollution covering some 40,000 acres along its shores. Maisel's photographs evidence the devastation of the region, the landscape becoming more complex with each layer of human intervention. Yet, the function, location, scale, and condition of these sites are intentionally obscured; no title names the Great Salt Lake or its environs. As Maisel intends, we are first engaged by the surreal and apocalyptic beauty of these images, all sharing exquisite abstract colorations and design. Then myriad questions arise: Who or what created what we see in these views? The answers are neither easily explained nor universally confirmed, and less interesting to Maisel than the questions and discussions the pictures might evoke.

  • With Library of Dust (2005-2006), Maisel continues to investigate the overlapping realms of ethics and aesthetics, with the secret or hidden being made visible, moving into new territory concerned with metaphysical and immeasurable loss. The series comprises photographs of copper canisters stored at an Oregon state psychiatric hospital, each containing the cremated remains of a patient, unclaimed by their families. With their intensely hued mineral blooms, each image is an empathic portrait of someone otherwise forgotten by time.

  • “Matter lives on even when the body vanishes, even when it has been destroyed. Does some form of spirit live on as well?”

  • The dual processes of memory and excavation inform Maisel’s two related series, History’s Shadow and Shadow Painting — the latter...

    David Maisel

    History's Shadow GM8, 2010

    64 x 48 inches: $26,000

    40 x 30 inches: $15,000

    Combined edition of 7 + 2 AP

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    The dual processes of memory and excavation inform Maisel’s two related series, History’s Shadow and Shadow Painting — the latter being offered for the very first time.


    Maisel began History’s Shadow in 2007: while in residence at the Getty Research Institute, he was captivated by art conservation x-rays of objects from the museum’s collections. He continued at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, culling through thousands of images between the two institutions. Maisel’s process of uncovering and bringing x-rays to light renders the artworks of origin as acutely alive.

    • David Maisel History's Shadow GM12, 2010 64 x 48 inches: $37,440 AP2 (from an edition of 7 + 2 AP)
      David Maisel

      History's Shadow GM12, 2010

      64 x 48 inches: $37,440

      AP2 (from an edition of 7 + 2 AP)

      Enquire
    • David Maisel History's Shadow AB1, 2010 64 x 48 inches: $26,000 40 x 30 inches: $15,000 Combined edition of 7 + 2 AP
      David Maisel

      History's Shadow AB1, 2010

      64 x 48 inches: $26,000

      40 x 30 inches: $15,000

      Combined edition of 7 + 2 AP
      Enquire

  • In Shadow Painting (2017), Maisel returned to the idea of examining x-rays, and found in paintings a new formal vocabulary with which to work. “The final images feel made of layers of history and time,” Maisel explains, “and give form to the ways in which painting and photography are inextricably intertwined.”

  • Apocalyptic / Sublime also debuts new works on paper from Maisel’s latest series, Memory Pictures. Sheltering in place for much...

    David Maisel

    Mount Greylock 4, 1972, 2020

    23 x 32 inches

    $4,000 unframed
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    Apocalyptic / Sublime also debuts new works on paper from Maisel’s latest series, Memory Pictures. Sheltering in place for much of 2020 due to the global pandemic and confronted by a climate of uncertainty, Maisel turned to painting as a source of solace: “I sought a space in which I could be, paradoxically, expansive and open. It was a way to move both outside of myself (my fear, my anxiety, my powerlessness) and into myself (my power, my growth, my internal world).” In these new watercolor paintings on handmade paper embedded with flowers and ferns, colorful gestural abstractions offer memories of calmer, peaceful moments.

  • “They brought me back in time to places, settings, landscapes that were unearthed by the momentary stillness of the world: the garden at my grandmother’s home, underneath a tree in my childhood backyard.”

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  • DAVID MAISEL, b. 1961, New York, NY | Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA

    Photo: Lynn Fontana

    DAVID MAISEL

    b. 1961, New York, NY | Lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA

    David Maisel’s photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations have recently been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; San Jose Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; Denver Art Museum; Nevada Art Museum, Reno; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. His works are included in many public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Yale University Art Gallery; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 

     

    Maisel was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2018, and has been a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, and Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His work has been the subject of seven monographs, most recently Proving Ground, jointly published by Radius Books and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art/Utah State University.