For more than twenty years, David Maisel has chronicled the tensions between nature and culture in his large-scaled photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes. In the multi-chaptered series Black Maps, Maisel’s aerial images, printed at a scale of up to 48"x96", become sublime meditations on what the curator Anne Tucker has termed the “engaging duality between beauty and repulsion.” Black Maps is a touring museum exhibition available through 2010.
In Maisel’s recent project, Library of Dust, he continues to investigate a zone bordered by aesthetics and ethics. The series depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital, whose bodies have been unclaimed by their families. Library of Dust will be published as an oversized monograph by Chronicle Books in Fall 2008.
Maisel was the recipient of an Artist/Scholar Residency at the Getty Research Institute in Fall 2007. He will be an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Institute for the Arts in Spring 2008.
© 2008 David Maisel. All rights reserved.