David Maisel at Miller Block

This article appeared in the January 2004 issue of artsMEDIA. Images of the artwork available here.

The Lake Project: Photographs by David Maisel
Miller Block Gallery
14 Newbery Street
Boston, MA
Through January 13th

by Tim Peterson

David Maisel's new show at Miller Block features a series of large arial landscape photographs of the Owens Valley in California. These C-prints, shot with a Hasselblad, at first glance appear to be abstract paintings. Their bright, ghastly shapes and colors create an otherworldly atmosphere which belies the fact that they are also records of environmental catastrophe.

The artist finds a moving subject in Owens Valley, a region which had its water source stolen and diverted to support the growing nearby city of LA in the 1920s. The Owens Lake dried up as a result, and carcinogenic dust from soil leached of its water is still carried across the valley by high winds. The photographs record this disaster site as well as results of EPA efforts in the late 1990s to re-irrigate the valley.

Maisel allows the horror of these scenes to coexist with a sublime expansiveness. The choice to take these pictures from the arial perspective, eliminating the horizon line, causes them to flicker between abstraction and representation, between flatness and depth. In "The Lake Project 9277-1," violent swathes of red, gray, and purple recall gestural abstraction and the shallow modernist picture-plane, but some tiny bushes in the lower left hand corner suddenly bring the scene into perspective, revealing that the subject matter is in fact very far away from the camera, very small and distant, and terrifying. Maisel's images work best when they straddle this line of depiction. They are documents of a place and a state of mind, a scene of devastation that is paradoxically seductive at the same time.