Week Six

David Maisel

About Him

 Born in  New York, 1961. He is an American photographer and visual artist. His works are exhibited internationally and is collected under many major museums and one of them is the Metropolitan Museum Of Art.

ABOUT HIS WORKS

The series of shadow silhouette-like images are called Shadow Painting. 

In Shadow Painting, the x-ray considers the canvas, the support structure of the painting, and the wood of the altarpiece – the material itself from which the artwork is made– as well as the ghostly, spectral images that seem to be unearthed from some distant, mysterious realm.

These abstract series is one of my favorite work of his. 

It is called " The Lake Project ".

“As engaged as he is in the surrounding issues, Maisel is not attempting to make literal records of environmental destruction. Rather, he seeks a distance that scrambles a conventional reading of the landscape. In this altered state, the laws of gravity are undone, solid ground gives way, and the photograph is experienced as a transcendent vision or tone poem, as much as a map of ecological disaster.” —Aperture, volume 172, Fall 2003

Library Of Dust

“What looks like violent decay is also generative change; each canister is a formal, ethical, and mineralogical Rorshach….Maisel’s work over the past two decades has argued for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the transmuted, the decomposed. Beauty that is generated at the cost of something precious or the result of flawed choices.” —Los Angeles Times feature, January 4, 2009

I am very fond of his photography works as he made photographs look like paintings and it is very unique compared to all the normal photographs I've seen. As I am very fond of abstract art, David's works reflects that and yet still had a meaning behind it. It was more like story-telling. His project " Library Of Dust " documents the forgotten details about an Asylum. Eventually, the abandoned place is seen as beautifully eroded in his eyes. Which I felt was fascinating on how he view things which made his photograph subjects very interesting and has a deeper meaning to it.