David Maisel, a visual artist and photographer, chronicles the tensions between nature and culture in his large-scaled photographs of worlds that hover between the visible and the invisible, the natural and unnatural, the sacred and the profane. Maisel’s practice is concerned with mining the visual territory of what he terms the “apocalyptic sublime,” and with addressing themes of loss, elegy, and memorialization. He is perhaps best known for his large-scaled photographs in Black Maps, a multi-chaptered series of abstracted aerial images of environmentally impacted sites, such as open pit mines, clear cut forests, and cyanide leaching fields.

Maisel’s photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and many others. Maisel was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Fall 2007, and an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Spring 2008. David Maisel’s work is represented by the Haines Gallery in San Francisco and the Von Lintel Gallery in New York. (davidmaisel.com)