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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“David Maisel: Black Maps” exhibition at the University of New Mexico Art Museum

September 13 - December 20, 2014. “David Maisel – Black Maps” is a solo exhibition surveying four chapters of Maisel’s larger ongoing series titled Black Maps. Composed of large-scale photographs, this exhibition leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through landscapes in the American West that have been transformed through the physical and environmental effects of industrial-scale water diversion projects, open-pit mineral extraction, and urban sprawl.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Imagining Deep Time” at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.

August 28 , 2014 – January 15, 2015. The concept of deep time was introduced in the 18th century, but it wasn't until the 1980s that American writer John McPhee coined the term "deep time" in his book Basin and Range. This exhibition, which contains 18 works by 15 artists, looks at the human implications of deep time through the lens of artists who bring together rational and intuitive thinking.
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Geoff Manaugh writes about The Fall on BLDGBLOG

At the end of 2013, photographer David Maisel was commissioned to photograph the city of Toledo, Spain, as part of a group exhibition called ToledoContemporánea, timed for a wider celebration of the 400th birthday of the painter El Greco. Maisel's photos offered a kind of aerial portraiture of the city, including its labyrinthine knots of rooftops. But the core of the project consists of disorientingly off-kilter, almost axonometric shots of the city's historic architecture.
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The New Yorker

Exhibition Review: The New Yorker, Goings On About Town: Art. May 5, 2014. Aletti, Vince. “A cache of X-rays of antique statuary from the archives of the Getty Museum provided Maisel with the ghostly imagery for his handsome new photographs. Isolated against pitch-black backgrounds, Buddha heads, a horse, a young warrior, and several classical maidens appear at once hollowed out and full of surprises…”
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“David Maisel: History’s Shadow” at Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY

April 3 – May 10, 2014 Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Historyʼs Shadow, the first exhibition at the gallery by American artist David Maisel. For over twenty-five years, Maiselʼs photographic work has been wide-ranging in scope, and yet deeply focused on what he describes as a “long-term investigation into the aesthetics of entropy, and the dual processes of memory and excavation.” Historyʼs Shadow utilizES x-rays as source material to explore the intersection of scientific research and visual art. The exhibition title comes from a project of the same name, inspired by the artistʼs residency at the Getty Research Institute, during which time he re-photographed x-rays of sculptural antiquities culled from the museum’s conservation archives.
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David Maisel

“History’s Shadow” Exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Opening Reception with the artist: Thursday, April 3, 2014, 6–8pm Yancey Richardson is pleased to present History’s Shadow, the first exhibition at the gallery by American artist David Maisel. For over twenty-five years, Maisel’s photographic work has been wide-ranging in scope, and yet deeply focused on what he describes as a “long-term investigation into the aesthetics of entropy, and the dual processes of memory and excavation.”
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Toledo Contemporanea” Exhibition and Book Publication

Ivorypress presents the photographic project ToledoContemporánea —curated by Elena Ochoa Foster and Ivorypress—which will be part of the exhibition program celebrating the fourth centennial of El Greco. The project, in collaboration with the Fundación El Greco 2014, offers a contemporary view of the city of Toledo: of its past, present and future realities. Twelve photographers have created photographic series about the Spanish city: José Manuel Ballester, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Matthieu Gafsou, Dionisio González, Rinko Kawauchi, Marcos López, David Maisel, Abelardo Morell, Vik Muniz, Shirin Neshat, Flore-äel Surun, Michal Rovner, and Massimo Vitali.
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National Geographic Photography Symposium, Washington DC

David Maisel a featured speaker at the 2014 National Geographic Photography Symposium, Washington DC. "The history of speakers includes both National Geographic photographers and luminaries of the larger photo world whose work goes beyond what would normally appear in the pages of our magazine. Of the process of choosing which photographers to invite to speak, Elizabeth Krist says: 'It’s the greatest opportunity. We fantasize about all the people in the photography world we would love to have in our living room.' This year, the list includes Hasan Elahi, Wayne Lawrence, Newsha Tavakolian, Tyler Hicks, Vincent Musi, David Maisel, and Danny Lyon with Julian Bond."
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Black Maps” monograph named to “Best Books of 2013”

“For nearly three decades, photographer and visual artist David Maisel — whose gloriously haunting Library of Dust project you might recall from a few years back — has been transforming landscape photography with his stunning aerial images exploring the relationship between Earth and humanity. Now, the best of them are collected in the magnificent monograph Black Maps: American Landscape and he Apocalyptic Sublime — a lavish large-format tome featuring more than 100 of Maisel’s surreally entrancing portraits of our worldly reality, at once beautiful and tragic..."
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Art Practical: review of Maisel’s “Mining” exhibit

Mining reviewed by Rob Marks on Art Practical: "David Maisel’s photographs are one thing, and yet another. Although the name of his current Haines Gallery show, Mining, cues viewers into the context of his images, many of them, even under close inspection, remain abstract. Such confusion is consistent with Maisel’s photographic procedures, which omit the physical and visual features that would betray the location or even the idea of a landscape. Maisel’s intention, however, is not so much to hide context as to not disclose it so that the images occupy an unstable position between documentation and abstraction."
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Huffington Post

“David Maisel's Photographs Of Open Pit Mines are Eerily Beautiful.”September 13, 2013. Brooks, Katherine. “At first glance David Maisel’s gorgeous photographs seem to celebrate the natural beauty of an otherworldly landscape. With bold blues and expressive reds, the images appear to capture unchartered river formations and mystical mountain passes that couldn't possibly belong to Earth. But Maisel's photographs are not celebrating the natural beauty of another planet. His various series illuminate the strangely magnificent aerial appearance of environmentally impacted sites in the United States. He focuses on lands that have been transformed by water reclamation, logging, military tests and mining, producing overwhelmingly stunning artworks that ultimately depict spoiled, desecrated beauty.”
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“David Maisel – Mining” at Haines Gallery, San Francisco

David Maisel – Mining at Haines Gallery, San Francisco. Opening reception with artist: First Thursday, September 5, 2013, 5:30pm – 7:30pm. For his fifth exhibition with Haines Gallery, Maisel presents Mining – a selection of photographs from The Mining Project and American Mine, series never before seen at the gallery. These works consider the relationship between nature and humanity, and encompass both stark documentary and tragic metaphor. With The Mining Project, Maisel negotiated a deliberate shift from black-and-white images to color, and started to produce large-scale photographs that make greater use of abstraction. Curator Natasha Egan suggests, “[h]is photographs derive their effectiveness through formal choices involving color, scale, perspective, and abstraction, which amplify their seductive nature, and conjure the elusive sublime.”
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

The Design Observer Group: Observatory

“David Maisel and the Apocalyptic Sublime.” August 9, 2013. Poynor, Rick. “The aerial photographs of David Maisel are often deeply disorientating. His pictures are visions of the Earth as we have never seen it and they are scarcely believable at times in their beauty and terror.”
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Arid Journal: David Maisel interview

Arid Journal: David Maisel in conversation with Lisa Tamiris Becker.

"Taken together, The Lake Project and Oblivion explore the interrelatedness of the phenomenology, aesthetics, and social/political reality of the Los Angeles metropolis and the arid landscapes and fragile watersheds in which the city is embedded and on which it ultimately depends."

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Cabinet Magazine publishes “American Mine”

Cabinet Magazine publishes Maisel's American Mine portfolio in Issue 50, Summer 2013, with writer Geoff Manaugh's essay Infinite Exchange. "Vast terraced bowls step down—and down and, impossibly, further down—tracking dead faults and mineralization fronts on a scale only made clear when we notice 16-ton trucks like specks of dust on canyon walls. Discolored oceans of chemical runoff wash across vehicle tracks with acid tides. Retaining walls and stabilized slopes loom over assembled superscapes of mine detritus, abandoned shells of industrial insects dwarfed by the world they’ve helped create...These mines grow in great metastasizing voids, like storm fronts of negative space exploding with slow thunder into the planet."
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Cabinet Magazine

Cabinet Magazine, Issue 50, Summer 2013. American Mine portfolio published, with writer Geoff Manaugh's essay Infinite Exchange: "Vast terraced bowls step down—and down and, impossibly, further down—tracking dead faults and mineralization fronts on a scale only made clear when we notice 16-ton trucks like specks of dust on canyon walls. Discolored oceans of chemical runoff wash across vehicle tracks with acid tides. Retaining walls and stabilized slopes loom over assembled superscapes of mine detritus, abandoned shells of industrial insects dwarfed by the world they’ve helped create...These mines grow in great metastasizing voids, like storm fronts of negative space exploding with slow thunder into the planet."
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“David Maisel / Black Maps – American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime.” Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ

June 1 – September 1, 2013. Composed of large-scale aerial photographs, this exhibition leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through sites in the American West that have been transformed through the physical and environmental effects of industrial-scale water diversion projects, open-pit mineral extraction, and urban sprawl. Maisel’s powerful images exist as aesthetic and political archives documenting the impact of both human consumption and inhabitation.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

The New York Times

“Beauty And Blight, Sharing Common Ground.” Monograph Review of Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime. May 24, 2013. “This eye-opening survey of the photographer David Maisel’s major aerial projects reveals the terrible beauty of the industrial age. Photo after photo unveils the common, human-created cancers forced upon on our landscapes: open-pit mines, hazardous waste sites, nerve-gas depots, the desolation of Los Angeles. These photos tell tales the way scars tell the story of a body — and who knew that poisons could be so seductively iridescent? Black Maps, rather than focusing on the death of beauty, wrestles with the beauty of death.”
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Black Maps” reviewed by The New York Times

Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime is reviewed in The New York Times by Dana Jennings. "This eye-opening survey of the photographer David Maisel's major aerial projects reveals the terrible beauty of the industrial age. Photo after photo unveils the common, human-created cancers forced upon on our landscapes: open-pit mines, hazardous waste sites, nerve-gas depots, the desolation of Los Angeles. These photos tell tales the way scars tell the story of a body — and who knew that poisons could be so seductively iridescent? Black Maps, rather than focusing on the death of beauty, wrestles with the beauty of death."
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

“Black Maps”: New monograph released from Steidl

"Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime" is the first in-depth survey of the major aerial projects by David Maisel, whose images of radically altered terrain have transformed the practice of contemporary landscape photography. In more than 100 photographs that span Maisel’s career, Black Maps presents a hallucinatory worldview encompassing both stark documentary and tragic metaphor, and exploring the relationship between nature and humanity today.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Hotshoe Magazine

“David Maisel: Black Maps.” Feature and interview. Issue 183. April – May 2013. Kouwenhoven, Bill. “For more than 25 years, David Maisel has looked down upon the American landscape and found shapes and forms that are hauntingly beautiful, yet which also speak to the devastating changes wrought by man’s progress and pursuit of profit at the expense of nature.”
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Domus Magazine

March 28, 2013. “The prospect the viewer is asked to share, and the proper standard by which to measure Maisel's vision, in other words, is no longer the all-too-human bird's-eye view, but the god's-eye view of Wallace Stevens’ necessary angel, who has inspired Maisel's work from its inception, as we learn from the magnificent volume that has been released in conjunction with the exhibition. The paradoxical title of both exhibition and book is borrowed, on the other hand, from another American poet, Mark Strand, while the category "apocalyptic sublime" is used to refer to Maisel's images in their subtitle and in a number of the informative and insightful essays in the book.”
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Domus Review of Maisel’s “Black Maps” Exhibit

Domus review by Davide Stimilli of David Maisel / Black Maps at the CU Boulder Art Museum. “The prospect the viewer is asked to share, and the proper standard by which to measure Maisel's vision...is no longer the all-too-human bird's-eye view, but the god's-eye view of Wallace Stevens’ necessary angel, who has inspired Maisel's work from its inception, as we learn from the magnificent volume that has been released in conjunction with the exhibition."
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime

Photographs and essay by David Maisel. Introduction by Julian Cox. Essays by Natasha Egan, Geoff Manaugh, Alan Rapp, Kirsten Rian, Joseph Thompson, and Kazys Varnelis. Poem by Mark Strand. Book design by Bob Aufuldish, Aufuldish & Warinner. Edited by Alan Rapp. 240 pp.; 11.5" x 11.5" hardcover with dustjacket. Published by Steidl. Publication date: Spring 2013.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Time Magazine’s LightBox

Paul Moakley, “Uncharted Territories: Black Maps by David Maisel.” March 27, 2013. “The original impetus for the work was informed by looking really closely at 19th-century exploratory photography,” explains Maisel, “and then, an arc through the New Topographics work of the 70s.” He cites the work of iconic black-and-white image makers like Lewis Baltz and Robert Adams — photographers who focused on man-altered landscapes — but felt inspired to “push it further.”
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Interview: A Conversation with David Maisel

David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961 and now lives and works in the San Francisco area. His photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations have been exhibited internationally, and are included in many permanent collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. His work has been the subject of three monographs: The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), and Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, 2008). A portfolio of Maisel's work is also available in Daylight Issue #3.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Library of Dust

Photographs by David Maisel. Essays by David Maisel, Geoff Manaugh, Michael Roth, Terry Toedtemeier. 108 pp, 71 color reproductions, 17"×14", casebound. Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco. Publication Date: October 2008.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Oblivion

Photographs and text by David Maisel. Essay by William L. Fox. 48 pp., 12”x12”, casebound. Published by Nazraeli Press, 2006.
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© David Maisel, All Rights Reserved

The Lake Project

Photographs and text by David Maisel. Introductory essay by Robert Sobieszek. 56 pp., 14"x14" casebound. Published by Nazraeli Press, 2004.
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