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library of dust
oblivion
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Features & Reviews
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The New Yorker. Review of solo exhibit “Library of Dust” at the Von Lintel Gallery. February 15, 2010. Aletti, Vince.
Flyp Media. "Dust to Dust.” June 18, 2009, 2009. Schneider, Lindsey.
Artforum.com. "Dust Collector.” April 16, 2009. Hultkrans, Andrew.
Los Angeles Times. "Strange beauty, transformation, secrets and loss.” January 4, 2009. Ollman, Leah.
Time.com. "Ashes to Art in Library of Dust.” January 8, 2009. Walt, Vivienne.
The New York Times. "Gifts Worth Buying a Coffee Table For.” November 28, 2008.
British Journal of Photography. "What Remains.” October 29, 2008. Houghton, Max.
ARTnews. "Kept in the Dark.” October, 2008. Robertson, Rebecca.
Financial Times. "Return to the Source.” July 12/13, 2008. Hodgson, Francis.
Xtra. "David Maisel's Library of Dust.” Fall, 2008. Lang, Karen.
Aperture. Review of "Dark Matters” at the Yerba Buena Center for the arts. Spring, 2008. Gluck, Robert.
Smithsonian. "Danger Zones" January 2008. Gambino, Megan.
Ciel Variable."Tapping Topography: An interview with David Maisel," June, 2007. Grande, John
ARTnews. Review of solo exhibit “Oblivion” at the Von Lintel Gallery. March, 2007. Landi, Ann.
West Magazine. "Photo Synthesis," reproduction of Oblivion 1382-52p. January 28, 2007. Westerbeck, Colin
Metropolis Magazine. "Searching for the Future," essay on Oblivion; January, 2007. Jacobs, Karrie.
Harpers Magazine."Readings," reproduction of Terminal Mirage 261-12. February, 2007.
The New York Sun. "The Roads Ahead, Scary and Serene." Review of solo exhibit “Oblivion” at the Von Lintel Gallery. December 14, 2006. Gelber, Eric.
The New Yorker. Review of solo exhibit “Oblivion” at the Von Lintel Gallery. December 11, 2006. Aletti, Vince.
Los Angeles Times. "Haunting Beauty from the Air" Review of solo exhibit “Oblivion” at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. November 17, 2006. Ollman, Leah.
Utne. “Library of Dust.” November-December, 2006 Hanus, Julie.
Contemporary magazine. “Human Ash Reactions.” Vol 86, Fall 2006. Manaugh, Geoff.
Utne. “Aerial Dreams.” May-June, 2006.
Art on Paper. “The New Global Photographers.” March-April, 2006. Rexer, Lyle.
Dwell Magazine. “Oblivion,” 8-page feature on Maisel’s aerial series on Los Angeles. September, 2005.
House and Garden. “Eye Witness; David Maisel’s Black Maps.”October, 2005. Cunningham, Caroline.
Boston Globe. “Images from above encourage viewers to look within.” Review of solo exhibit of “Terminal Mirage” at the Miller Block Gallery. October 7, 2005. McQuaid, Cate.
Issues in Science and Technology. “Terminal Mirage,” Volume XXII, Fall 2005.
Los Angeles Times. Review of solo exhibit “Terminal Mirage” at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. May 27, 2005. Ollman, Leah.
Art News. Review of solo exhibit “Terminal Mirage” at the Von Lintel Gallery. June 2, 2005. Heuer, Megan.
Photograph magazine. “About the Cover; David Maisel’s Terminal Mirage.” May/June 2005. Rexer, Lyle.
Art on Paper. Review of solo exhibit “Terminal Mirage” at the Von Lintel Gallery. March/April 2005. Grande, John.
The Village Voice. Review of solo exhibit “Terminal Mirage” at the Von Lintel Gallery. January 2005. Aletti, Vince.
The Village Voice. “The Top 25 Photo Books of 2004.” January 24,2005. Aletti, Vince.
Photography Quarterly. Review of “The Lake Project” monograph. PQ# 91. Shanberg, Ariel.
The New York Times. “Hell from the Air: Turning the Owens Valley into Environmental Art.” biographical essay, May 9, 2004. Wallach, Amei.
Art Review. “To the Ends of the Earth,” Cover image by David Maisel. October 2004. Crump, James.
Daylight Magazine.“Oblivion,” essay by David Maisel with 8 pages of his aerial images. Fall 2004. Back cover image by David Maisel.
Prefix Photo Magazine.“Terminal Mirage,” feature. Volume 10; Fall 2004.
European Photography. Cover and six-page feature on “Terminal Mirage.” Volume 25, summer 2004.
Audubon Magazine. “Ghost Lake.” Six page essay of images and text from “The Lake Project.” May, 2004. Rosner, Hillary.
The Boston Globe. “Salvaging Beauty from a Valley’s Destruction,” review of solo exhibit of “The Lake Project” at the Miller Block Gallery; January 2, 2004. McQuaid, Cate.
SFGate. Review of “The Lake Project” solo exhibit at James Nicholson Gallery. May, 2004. Bing, Alison.
Aperture. “Immaculate Destruction: David Maisel’s Lake Project. Fall 2003. Gaston, Diana.
Harper’s Magazine. “Black Maps,” reproduced in the Readings section, July, 2003.
The Village Voice. Review of solo exhibit at the Von Lintel Gallery. July 19, 2003. Aletti, Vince.
The New York Times. “David Maisel at the Von Lintel Gallery.” Review of solo exhibit. June 27, 2003. Glueck, Grace.
The New York Times. “Abstraction in Photography.” Review of group exhibit. March 7, 2003. Glueck, Grace.
Camera Arts. “The Abstract Aerial Landscape Photography of David Maisel.” April/May, 2003. Olson, Marisa.
Art News. “David Maisel at the Bolinas Museum.” Review; April, 2003. Keats, Jonathon.
Art Week. “David Maisel at the Bolinas Museum.” Review; April 2003. Van Proyen, Mark.
Chicago Tribune. Review of solo exhibit at the Schneider Gallery; June 13, 2003. Artner, Alan.
Chicago Reader. “Off the Face of the Earth.” Review of solo exhibit at the Schneider Gallery; June 27, 2003. Camper, Fred.
Publications
Arrow denotes catalogue of exhibition
Trouble in Paradise: Examining Dischord Between Nature and Society. Casebound exhibition catalog for Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ. February 28-June 28, 2009. Sasse, Julie; Handlin, Emily.
Water. New York, NY; teNeues Publishing Group; 2008. Prix Pictet 2008. Johnson, Leo: Hodgson, Francis.
The Map as Art. New York, NY; Princeton Architectural Press; 2009. Harmon, Katharine.
The BLDGBLOG Book. San Francisco, CA; Chronicle Books; 2009. Manaugh, Jeff.
Getty Research Journal. Los Angeles, CA; Number 1, 2009. "Voluptuousness Unease: David Maisel's Library of Dust". Lang, Karen
Kerb Journal of Landscape Architecture. Australia; School of Architecture and Desgin, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Volume 17, 2008-2009. "Crisis in Landscape Representation". Bustamante, Cesar Torres.
Oblivion. Portland, OR; Nazraeli Press, 2006. Monograph; photographs by David Maisel, essay by Fox, William L., and poem by Strand, Mark.
Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl. Chicago, IL; University of Chicago Press; 2006. San Jose Museum of Art and Center for American Places, co-publishers. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Wolfe, Ann.
Terminal Mirage. Catalogue for gallery exhibitions, 2005. Tucker, Anne.
Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; University of California Press, 2005. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Selz, Peter.
Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate.Co-published by Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, and Contact Photography Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2005. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Meadow Brook Art Gallery, Oakland University, Rochester, MI. Baillargeon, Claude; Kennedy, Robert F. Jr., and Sutnik, Maia-Mari.
New Turf.Catalogue to exhibition at the Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, July-October 2005. Hankins, Evelyn.
Nieman Reports. “Water: A Life Force Harnessed as News.” Cover image. Spring 2005.
Blue Sky 04/05. Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, catalogue of 2004 exhibitions.
Paradise Paved. Catalogue to exhibition at the Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, PA. April-May 2005.
Traces and Omens. Stichting Aurora Borealis, Groningen, Netherlands, in association with Noorderlicht Festival, 2005. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Noorderlicht Festival, Groningen, Netherlands. Mellis, Wim.
Zyzzyva. San Francisco, Volume XXI, Number 2, Fall 2005.
The Lake Project. Tucson, AZ; Nazraeli Press, 2004.Monograph; photographs by David Maisel, essays by Sobieszek, Robert and Maisel, David.
No Man’s Land: Contemporary Photographers and Fragile Ecologies. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC, 2004. Sloan, Mark.
Robert Smithson.Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA; University of California Press, 2004. Contributed several images of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Tsai, Cornelia and Butler, Connie.
Celebrating Water, Fotofest H2004. Fotofest catalogue for exhibition of “The Lake Project” and works by other artists, 2004.
Dirt Press, a journal of cotemporary arts and literature. New York and San Francisco, Dirt Press. Issue 1.4, June 2004.
The New American Pastoral: Landscape Photography in the Age of Questioning. Catalogue accompanying exhibition; published by International Museum of Photography, Rochester, NY. Sobieszek, Robert.
Essays
“Shadowlands.” William L. Fox. Reprinted from Oblivion, Nazraeli Press, 2006.
“When the Whole is Indecipherable.” Anne Wilkes Tucker. Reprinted from Terminal Mirage catalogue, 2005.
“The Lake Project.” Diana Gaston. Reprinted from Aperture, volume 172, Fall 2003.
“Library of Dust.” David Maisel.
“Report from the Lake.” David Maisel. Reprinted from The Lake Project, Nazraeli Press, 2004.
“Unraveling Smithson: Some Thoughts and Considerations Regarding Robert Smithson’s Art and Writings and Their Effect and Influence on My Own Art Practice.” David Maisel.
Interviews
June 2009: online interview/profile by Lindsey Schneider on FLYP
March 2007: radio feature by Trey Kay on Studio 360, Public Radio International.
January 2007: interview by Jorg Colberg on Conscientious.
March 2006: interview by Geoff Manaugh on Archinect.
April 2005: audio interview by Jim Casper on Lens Culture.
Quotes
Quotes about Library of Dust
“Library of Dust, from photographer David Maisel, may well be this year’s most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)”. Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel’s book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes discover about what has come before.”
“Each urn wears its own distinctive pattern of wear and decay. Seepage from within or moisture from outside have transformed the copper into an oscillating palette of mineral tones- malachite, jade, turquoise. A white crystalline crust branches across one can’s rim like coral or a salt deposit. An aqua scar draws don the seam of another. What looks like violent decay is also generative change; each canister is a formal, ethical, and mineralogical Rorshach….Maisel’s work over the past two decades has argued for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the transmuted, the decomposed. Beauty that is generated at the cost of something precious or the result of flawed choices.”
“Oddly reminiscent of bullet casings, the canisters are literally gravesites. Reacting with their ash inhabitants, the canisters are now blooming with secondary minerals, articulating new metallic landscapes grown in miniature. Adding yet another level of resonance, these urns, set against a deep black background, subtly resemble the earliest images of earth taken from space, complete with apparent coastlines and island arcs…This canister-as-planet is a comparison Maisel himself explicitly makes: ‘they are micro-terrains.”
“Maisel’s act of photographing these canned corpses reanimates the dead, allowing the observer to linger with them in a strange, extraterritorial place…In photographing these corroded vessels, Maisel acknowledges their evocation of the celestial, the aurora borealis. I would suggest they also have a Stygian, subterranean mood. In both directions, we are drawn to the very limits of the knowable universe. Perhaps they most closely resemble something which has thus far remained invisible to the human eye.”
“The contact of copper and water has transformed the surfaces of the canisters surfaces voluptuously. These surfaces conjure real and imaginative worlds—the dust of galaxies, being under a microscope, the dazzling colrs of the wide-open mind. The canister’s surfaces appear so, and they appear under duress. Transformed by time and fate, one might say, philosophically. Yet to say so would be to veer away from the obdurate individuality ofthe canisters, from their stubborn insistence, from the way they greet me as present and abiding, despite their magnificent duress.”
Quotes about Oblivion
“(Maisel’s) fine new work is on more familiar territory- the city of Los Angeles- but it still looks like another, much more forbidding planet. That's partly the result of Maisel's decision to print these black-and-white aerial pictures in negative, so skyscaper shadows read as erasures and trees as moldy excrescences on the grid. This is not the first time you've seen an overhead shot of L.A.'s looping freeway interchanges, but Maisel abstracts them and everything else here until the city appears depopulated, absolutely postapocalyptic.”
“The photos, large-format black-and-white squares printed in negative so that much of the urban landscape is a snowy white-“It’s almost like everthings's made of dust”- are meant to convey the horror of the city’s relentless small scale march across the landscape. But at the same time the images are quite beautiful, and the endless expanse of insignificance takes on a monumental quality when viewed from high above. the freeways possess a grace from two miles up; and the high-contrast technique gives the city a crispness, a formal elegance, that it lacks at ground level.”
“The term ‘shadowland’ that Maisel uses when discussing the Oblivion photographs is appropriate. When you cast a shadow on a fact, you create doubt. When you shadow someone, you follow them invisibly. Shadowland is what the military calls those blacked-out areas where they wish to operate unseen, whether they are testing an experimental aircraft or interrogating people beyond lawful means. It is a land of spies and spooks, a place where ghosts live, and what Los Angeles looks like in Oblivion. The city is almost recognizable in Maisel's negative prints and yet not quite, as if we are seeing both more of what we know and less.”
Quotes about Terminal Mirage
“The series Terminal Mirage…is as visually mesmerizing as an abstract canvas, with its sharp geometries and green fluorescence. The end of the world surely never looked this good. So good, in fact, that it is often difficult to know what we are seeing…Extended without limit, the very things that hypnotize us with the aesthetic dimension of humankind’s presence- our architecture, our machines, our domestication of wilderness- contain the seeds of our destruction, modernity’s poisoned wish. Perhaps when all the warnings have become laments, the last photographer will record the singularly beautiful image of a worn-out world, terminal but no longer just a mirage.”
“As (Maisel) intends, we are first engaged by the beauty that dances across these large scale prints. Then myriad questions arise from curiosity. Who or what created what we see in these views? The answers are neither easily explained nor universally confirmed, and the answers are less interesting to Maisel than the questions and discussions the pictures might evoke.”
“Maisel’s aerial views of Utah’s Great Salt Lake give the viewer almost no visual foothold, no clue to the meaning of these jewel-like swatches, delicately veined basins, and patchwork quilts of bloody water. With the exception of a shot of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty- a bleached curlicue breaking the surface of a wine dark sea- the photos are gorgeous abstractions whose beauty is tainted only by the knowledge that its otherworldly coloration is the result of toxic industrial pollution.”
“Maisel’s work is so rich with visual information that at some point you have to stop trying to make sense of it and just succumb to its glassy loveliness.”
Quotes about The Lake Project
“As Mr. Maisel renders it, the lake, which has been drained over the last 90 years to green the lawns and ice the whiskies of Los Angeles, looks scourged and flayed...In Mr. Maisel’s photos, the vistas are majestic, terrifying, and weirdly beautiful. They seem more intimate than microscopic data, vaster than extraterrestrial space.”
“David Maisel has for the last 20 years been photographing the locations of tailings ponds and former lakes, creating luminous abstractions noteworthy for their super-saturated color. These vertiginous pictures bring to mind Adam Fuss’ trippy photograms of rabbit entrails and cow liver, and they also possess a disturbing science-fiction quality, as if civilization were on the brink of extinction.”
“The topography of the lake in Maisel’s photographs is at times completely incomprehensible, devoid of any normative logic, a fervid landscape of the human psyche….Maisel has succeeded in mapping the fictive terrains of the unconscious, of nightmares and hallucinations. He has also used the camera’s objectifying optics to form cartographies of the irrational and the perverse, the preconscious and the primordial, the apocalyptic.”
“As engaged as he is in the surrounding issues, Maisel is not attempting to make literal records of environmental destruction. Rather, he seeks a distance that scrambles a conventional reading of the landscape. In this altered state, the laws of gravity are undone, solid ground gives way, and the photograph is experienced as a transcendent vision or tone poem, as much as a map of ecological disaster….Maisel’s images offer brief measures of time, suspending elements of grace within a continuum of failure and erasure.”
“Following in the footsteps of Smithson, who photographed many of his sites from the air…Maisel takes aerial photographs that make us aware of both the beauty of the land and its human-inflicted wounds…Maisel’s large prints- measuring four feet by four feet- compel appreciation as dramatic works of sheer visual beauty. But they turn terrifying once the viewer becomes aware of the photographer’s subjects. Edmund Burke’s eighteenth century notions of the beautiful and the sublime seem to be combined in these camera productions.”
“(Maisel’s) pictures of erosion, desiccation, and other forms of geologic mayhem that are only too photogenic have the force of abstract paintings. They give pleasure despite the horrendous facts that lie behind them.”
“With virtually no landscape markers, Maisel’s chaotic, abstract, and weirdly beautiful images prompt us to meditate on the representation of nature- and the nature of representation.”
“Unlike much contemporary color photography, Maisel’s matte C-prints earn every square inch of their large format. Satisfying abstract compositions are made out of the myriad blots and scratches of unidentified environmental wreckage…Visual ambiguity…is the real accomplishment of Maisel’s photography…His Lake Project offers an experience equivalent to his own mixture of attraction and repulsion upon first finding that pink swath of toxic lake.”
“Chromatically, these are very intense pictures. However, because they are so easily viewed as pure abstraction, their ecological force registers upon the viewer slowly. That their unnatural color has consequences to the land is the point, despite the images’ deceptive beauty. Maisel has photographed sites that do not seem of this world, and no matter how we are seduced by them we have to understand that they are of our own terrible making.”
“In 26 extraordinary aerial views, Maisel turns the alarming specificity of blood-red streams and scab-like erosions into sprawling, sci-fi abstractions, at once marvelous and appalling, that leave the viewer unmoored, lost in space. Against all odds, Maisel’s text is as compelling as his photos: He sees the lake as “a sacred text, in a language we cannot decipher…The lake as loss, the photographs as mourning.”