The exhibition Black Maps features large-scale photography by renowned aerial photographer David Maisel. The exhibition is comprised of three series of aerial photographs that present environmentally impacted landscapes. Although, in many cases, these photographs reveal vast areas of devastated landscape, they also transcribe an interior psychic landscape that is profoundly beautiful.
According to the artist, David Maisel, “Maps, like photographs, are designed to offer an objective overview, a means to comprehend our location; they are both place and concept, figurative and abstract. But a map that is black, as the title of this work suggests, is a kind of negation. Black maps are indeed unknowable and unnamable; they are ciphers. Perhaps these are the only kinds of pictures, with their compelling ambiguities, with which we can mark the demise of these landscapes.”
Maisel’s photographs are contemporary representations of the sublime. In his work, he frames the complexities of an environmentally impacted landscape with equal measures of documentation and metaphor, beauty and despair. Maisel is a photographer and visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay area. His artwork is represented in major public and private collections and his photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Europe.