David Maisel: Terminal Mirage

The Great Salt Lake in Utah, the site of the aerial photographs that comprise the Terminal Mirage project, is a terminal lake, meaning that it has no natural outlets. This physical property results in the Lakes exceptional richness in sodium, magnesium, potassium, chloride, sulfate, and other elements  many of which are common to traditional photographic chemistry. 

Some 40,000 acres of commercially operated evaporation ponds surround the Great Salt Lakes perimeter, formed to extract these minerals from its waters for industrial use. These grids of human-made ponds become a labyrinth laid over the surface of the Lake and its shoreline. 

This series is a major chapter of my Black Maps project, in which I utilize an aerial perspective to photograph radically altered terrain that has undergone extreme environmental transformation; they show us evidence of our Anthropocene Era.

The abstraction in these topographic images conjures mid-century modernism and color field painting, in particular the work of Rothko, Diebenkorn, and Frankenthaler. That parallel is intentional, as I am interested in revealing how landscape contains and reflects the goals and impulses of the past centurys modernist quest.

Looking down onto these zones, where human activity has replaced the natural order, what I see is at once seductively beautiful and terrible. The images in Terminal Mirage are intended to expand our notions of what constitutes landscape and landscape art in this era of the post-natural world. 

Edition: 1 of 1

Terminal Mirage 56

Terminal Mirage 52

Terminal Mirage 05

Terminal Mirage 09

Terminal Mirage 07

Gregory Crewdson: Dream House

Crewdsons 2002 project, Dream House peers into the unseen psychological dramas of domestic American life. Focused largely on elaborately staged scenes of home interiors, the twelve images from this portfolio represent frozen moments filled with clues and gestures that suggest underlying narrative sequences that bend ideas of family life into surrealist fantasy. In Dream House, Crewdson nods to the significant influence of cinema over his work by employing actors such as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tilda Swinton, and Gwyneth Paltrow to stand in as subjects to perform Crewdsons melodramas in still form. In doing so, Crewdson emphasizes the power of still narrative in relationship to stories told through time, and argues that photographic storytelling can exist as equal in stature to box office films.

Edition: 1 of 1

Dream House, Untitled, 2002, [Unreleased] Production Still [No. 3]

Dream House, Untitled, 2002, [Unreleased] Production Still [No. 2]

Dream House, Untitled, 2002, [Unreleased] Production Still [No. 1]

Dream House, Untitled, 2002, [Unreleased] Polaroid [No. 4]

Dream House, Untitled, 2002, [Unreleased] Polaroid [No. 3]

John Divola: Isolated Houses

These are photographs of isolated structures in the high desert of Southern California. All of the images are made in the east end of the Morongo Valley Basin, Wonder Valley, and the area surrounding the town of Twenty-Nine Palms. This is an area approximately one hundred- and fifty-miles due East of Los Angeles. From the oceans edge in L.A., to the area that I am photographing, the landscape is continuously occupied. This area is the final edge of a vast urban expanse. For social, financial, or personal reasons individuals are pushed, or pulled, or simply seek this literal cultural edge. Beyond this point is unoccupied desert.  In the past I have perused projects which dealt with the iconography of transcendence and the sublime. In other projects I have investigated the literal desire to get "outside" of or beyond the cultural (a desire with the ironic consequence of transforming the natural into the very condition one wishes to escape). It is this conceptual trajectory which has led me to this current body of work. This current body of work is an extension of the investigation begun in the "four landscape" portfolio. The structural rigor of that work has been replaced with concerns which are aesthetic and social. On the simplest level I am drawn to the vernacular character of the architecture (painted with a Home Depot palette) as well as the amazing visual character of these structures on this vast desert plain lit by an extraordinary light. However, at base, my primary interest is to create images which are iconographic of a desire. A desire to be "beyond", a desire to be alone, a sign of man on the landscape. - John Divola.

Edition: 1 of 1

N3410.466W11554.878

N3409.951 W11549.269

These are photographs of isolated structures in the high desert of Southern California. All of the images are made in the east end of the Morongo Valley Basin, Wonder Valley, and the area surrounding the town of Twenty-Nine Palms. This is an area approximately one hundred- and fifty-miles due East of Los Angeles. From the oceans edge in L.A., to the area that I am photographing, the landscape is continuously occupied. This area is the final edge of a vast urban expanse. For social, financial, or personal reasons individuals are pushed, or pulled, or simply seek this literal cultural edge. Beyond this point is unoccupied desert.  In the past I have perused projects which dealt with the iconography of transcendence and the sublime. In other projects I have investigated the literal desire to get "outside" of or beyond the cultural (a desire with the ironic consequence of transforming the natural into the very condition one wishes to escape). It is this conceptual trajectory which has led me to this current body of work. This current body of work is an extension of the investigation begun in the "four landscape" portfolio. The structural rigor of that work has been replaced with concerns which are aesthetic and social. On the simplest level I am drawn to the vernacular character of the architecture (painted with a Home Depot palette) as well as the amazing visual character of these structures on this vast desert plain lit by an extraordinary light. However, at base, my primary interest is to create images which are iconographic of a desire. A desire to be "beyond," a desire to be alone, a sign of man on the landscape. - John Divola.

Edition: 1 of 1

N3411.185W11606.725

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N3411.581 W11555.039

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