David Maisel

For over thirty years, Maisel has produced aerial photographs of compromised landscapes in a multi-chaptered series titled Black Maps, revealing the physical impact of activities such as mining, logging, urban sprawl, and military testing. Rather than create literal documents, the artist has exploited the slippage between the evidentiary and aesthetic functions of photography. The resulting images subvert cartographic mapping, instead occupying a zone both imaginative and descriptive, informed by the politics of land use.

His body of work, Proving Ground, utilizes photography and time-based media to investigate Dugway Proving Ground, a classified military installation in the Utah desert devoted to the development and testing of chemical and biological weapons and defense systems.

In projects such as Library of Dust and History’s Shadow, Maisel delves into institutional archives to illustrate the power of objects to convey meaning over time. History’s Shadow uses x-rays depicting sculpture, painting, and artifacts from antiquity as source material in the creation of new photographic artwork. Through the re-photography of these scientific records from the Getty Museum and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Maisel subjects these objects from antiquity to a process of transmutation, allowing them to become reanimated and renewed.