David Maisel: Un/Earthed
Past exhibition
Overview
Haines Gallery proudly presents David Maisel: Un/Earthed, our eighth solo exhibition with the Bay Area artist. For over thirty years, Maisel has created powerful photographs of sites transformed by human intervention. At once mesmerizing and disquieting, his thoughtfully composed aerial images consider the aesthetics, politics, and environmental impact of these radically altered landscapes.
Un/Earthed brings together a survey of Maisel’s aerial works from various series created between 1989 and 2018. The Mining Project (1989), The Lake Project (2001-15), and Terminal Mirage (2003-05) chronicle the effects of mining, industrial pollution, water diversion projects, and desertification across the American West, from open pit mines in Arizona and Montana to the depletion of Owens Lake in California and Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The Fall (2013) depicts zones of industry and agriculture in Spain, while his most recent series, Desolation Desert (2018), created with support from a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, focuses on the massive copper and lithium mining operations in Chile’s Atacama Desert. This sensitive eco-region is being transformed at an unparalleled pace and scale, reflecting a shift in the burden of energy production onto landscapes in the southern hemisphere.
In Maisel’s images, we find a strange, discomfiting beauty born of environmental degradation. Giving detailed but open-ended information, Maisel’s works operate on a metaphorical level as much as a documentary one. Lush, saturated colors belie sites of ecological damage: painterly washes of industrial waste and toxic algae blooms, the jewel-toned grids of lithium evaporation ponds. Graphic marks emerge from manmade trauma on land that has been carved, scarred, and drained.
The exhibition’s title, Un/Earthed, suggests both the extractive industries behind these changes as well as the process of discovery made possible through Maisel’s photographs. Witnessed from an aerial perspective, the landscape is abstracted and disorienting, a reflection of the physical transformations brought about by human efforts. The terrain here is an alien one, the Earth made unearthly by our own presence.
Exhibition Views
Installation view of David Maisel: Un/Earthed, November 3, 2023 - January 6, 2024 at Haines Gallery, San Francisco
Photo: Robert Divers Herrick
Selected Works
