The Lake Project, #9281-2, 2002 C-print, 29" x 29" and 48" x 48" David Maisel The Lake Project James Nicholson Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of large-scale color photographs by David Maisel. For more than two decades, David Maisel has explored American landscapes that have been transformed by severe environmental damage. Captured from an aerial perspective, Maisel's photographs appear as abstracted, complex maps of the abused terrain. The large-scale prints encompass the viewer's peripheral vision, and their lushness and strange beauty are psychologically demanding as well as visually exhilarating. They convey something of the seemingly limitless aspect of the sites from which they are made. In these photographs, the forms of environmental disquiet and degradation function on both a documentary and metaphorical level, and the aerial perspective enables one to experience the landscape like a vast map of its undoing. "The Lake Project", the third in Maisel's "Black Maps" series of environmentally impacted landscapes, examines Owens Valley in southern California, the site of a formerly 200-square mile lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Beginning in 1913, water from Owens Lake was diverted into the Owens Valley aqueduct to hydrate the desert city of Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been depleted, leaving vast mineral flats in its wake. Viewed from the air, vestiges of the lake look like a river of blood, a microchip, a bisected vein, or a galaxy's map. The wondrous beauty of Maisel's photographs belies the horrifying physical wreckage wrought by human endeavor. Maisel makes it clear that he seeks neither to vilify nor glorify his subject, but rather to expand our notion of what constitutes landscape and landscape art. He reveals the landscape in more than purely visual terms: the photograph transcribes the ravaged ground as an archetypal space of destruction and ruin that mirrors the darker corners of our consciousness. Maisel has exhibited widely in the United States. His photographs are represented in many museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the George Eastman House. Nazraeli Press will publish Maisel's first monograph, "The Lake Project", with an introductory essay by Robert Sobieszek, in May 2004. David Maisel lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Exhibition: March 31 - May 29, 2004 Gallery Hours: Tue-Fri 11am - 5:30pm, Sat 11am - 5pm James Nicholson Gallery 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor USA-San Francisco, CA 94108 Telephone +1 415 397 0100 Fax +1 415 397 0155 Email: info@nicholsongallery.com www.nicholsongallery.com www.davidmaisel.com |
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