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.”
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 is on exhibit in the show Dark Matters at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, from July-November, 2007.
