SANTA BARBARA
David Maisel: “Oblivion,” at Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Selections from David Maisel’s recent body of work constitute this small but powerful exhibition on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through April 27th. Seven large-scale aerial photographs of Los Angeles dominate the dark and intimate gallery space. The images, printed as black and white negatives, underscore the eccentricities of the densely populated city; Maisel’s freeways draw black cuts through the falsely pastoral roads of a housing development and green trees are as chalky white as a dry lake bed.

The monograph of this work, published by Nazraeli Press and JGS, Inc, introduces the Oblivion series with a poem by Mark Strand entitled, “Black Maps.” The sense of futility and impossible vanity of humankind is captured by Strand’s phrase, “You can walk/ believing you cast/ a light around you./ But how will you know?/ The present is always dark./ Its maps are black….” Maisel’s work, too, points to that dark chasm that opens up when the familiar boundaries of individual experience are confronted by reminders of the vast and enigmatic cityscape.

But, these works do not offer a quiet vantage point from which to consider the transcendental aesthetic of man in contest with nature. Nor do they leave a trace of the conqueror, the artist who points to the view from the edge of the frame, a pictorial convention frequently employed by Golden Age cartographers. Instead, these works steadily refuse the viewer a place for static contemplation. All but one of the works depict the city without reference to the horizon. This vertiginous gaze complicates the viewer’s experience of location and direction. Familiar landmarks, like a cluster of downtown buildings or a cloverleaf freeway interchange are rendered even more abstract through the X-ray inversion of black and white and the grainy quality of the enlargements.