DAVID MAISEL ::::

David Maisel’s photographic series Surveillance looks at military landscapes within the confines of the US borders, spaces which are hidden from most citizens. Maisel began this project by surveying aeronautical charts and topographical maps of the American West and found that much of the terrain and corresponding airspace had been cordoned off for military use by the government. The images in Surveillance are zones of exclusion, both physically and psychologically, as US citizens do not generally know about the existence of such places on the contemporary American landscape. In 2004 Maisel flew over and photographed Tooele Army Depot outside of Salt Lake City and, a year later, Hawthorne Army Depot 90 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada. At a time when satellite views are being democratized by Google Earth and other forms of space imaging, most people still haven’t had the opportunity to see how much of the American landscape is cut off. Who controls the seen and the unseen and what does the previously unseen look like? In an age of increased observation/surveillance by governments in the name of the “war on terrorism,” Maisel raises the possibility of turning around the act of surveillance to suggest that the private citizen can also survey the activity of his government.

Maisel’s large-scaled photographs show the physical impact on the land from industrial efforts such as mining, logging, water reclamation, and military testing. Because these sites are often remote and inaccessible, Maisel frequently works from an aerial perspective, thereby permitting images and photographic evidence that would be otherwise unattainable. He received an Individual Artist’s Grant from the NEA and was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2007. In 2008, he is in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. www.davidmaisel.com