. David Maisel / Black Maps : American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime
David Maisel / Black Maps is a solo show 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. Maisel’s powerful aerial photographs exist as aesthetic and political archives documenting the impact of both human consumption and inhabitation. More than mere records, these photographs evoke sublime beauty and apocalyptic destruction, positioning David Maisel at the forefront of a complex new approach to framing and interpreting issues of contemporary landscape and culture. Maisel’s mineral-based, painterly color prints transform poisonous human-altered landscapes into subjects and objects of extreme beauty while simultaneously unveiling the magnitude of hidden ecological devastation that punctuates the vast interior of the American West, a space that is often represented in the visual, cinematic, and literary arts as endless and eternal.
EXHIBITION
David Maisel / Black Maps
February 9 – May 11, 2013
CU Art Museum
University of Colorado at Boulder
1085 18th St., Boulder
Denver, CO 80309
USA
. Primal Seen : Selections from the CU Art Museum’s Collection of Photography from the 19th Century to the Present.
The exhibition features selections from the museum’s collection of over 1300 photographs highlighting themes including remembrance and memory, the gaze and the female body, and 19th century tropes as they are referenced in the works of contemporary artists. Artists featured in the exhibition include Sama Alshaibi, E.J. Bellocq, Michael Bishop, Kate Breakey, Albert Chong, Linda Connor, Judy Dater, Jeanne Dunning, Ralph Gibson, Judith Golden, Philippe Halsman, Robert Heinecken, Mary Ellen Mark, Esther Parada, Laura Shill, Lou Stoumen, Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, and George Woodman. The exhibition also includes 19th century hand-colored photographs, cartes-de-visite, stereoscopic albumen prints, ambrotypes, and daguerreotypes.
EXHIBITION
Primal Seen
Through June 22, 2013
CU Art Museum
University of Colorado at Boulder
1085 18th St., Boulder
Denver, CO 80309
USA
