The Lake Project
June 3 – 26, 2004
Black Maps is an ongoing project comprised of aerial photographs, video projections, and site-specific installations depicting environmentally impacted landscapes. These images and interventions show the undoing of the natural world by wide-scaled human activity. The depiction of these damaged wastelands, where our collective efforts have eradicated the natural order, are both spectacular and horrifying.
A major chapter in this work is The Lake Project, begun in 2001, and ongoing through 2015. It comprises images from Owens Lake, the site of a formerly 200 square-mile lake in California on the eastern side of the Sierra Mountains. Owens Lake had been a water-filled lake for some 78 million years. Beginning in 1913, however, the Owens River was diverted into the Owens Valley Aqueduct, to bring water to the fledgling desert city of Los Angeles. By 1926, the lake had been essentially depleted, exposing vast mineral flats and transforming a fertile valley into an arid stretch of land. The concentration of minerals in the remaining water of Owens Lake is so artificially high that blooms of microscopic bacterial organisms result, turning the liquid a deep, bloody red.
For decades, fierce winds have dislodged microscopic particles from the lakebed, creating carcinogenic dust storms. Indeed, the lakebed became the highest source of particulate matter pollution in the United States, emitting some 300,000 tons annually of cadmium, chromium, arsenic and other materials. Owens Lake produces 10 to 100 times more dust than any other dry lake in California or Nevada; by some estimates, it produces 8% of all the fine dust in the United States. During a severe storm, 50 tons of dust per second comes off the lakebed.
The dust from Owens Lake, fine and white as flour, is designated as PM-10. “PM” stands for particulate matter, and “10” signifies that individual particles are smaller than 10 micrograms in diameter, which allows them to infiltrate lung tissue. In other words, you breathe this dust in, but you don’t breathe it out. It remains in your body. Scientists at Harvard have concluded a study indicating that inhaling significant amounts of this type of dust can increase death rates by 26 percent. According to a recent study on PM-10, “there may be no threshold below which health effects do not occur.” The dust from Owens Lake affects about 40,000 permanent residents between Ridgecrest and Bishop, California.
To reduce the toxic dust storms, a large area of the lakebed has been, since 2002, turned into the Flood Zone. Fifteen percent of the water that would have headed to LA for Angelenos to drink, bathe, and wash their cars or irrigate their gardens, is now redirected onto the lakebed, where shallow flooding is intended to mitigate airborne PM-10. After decades of destruction, the ground has again been flooded, this time by decree of the Environmental Protection Agency. With each successive layer of intervention, the landscape becomes more complex. In addition to Los Angeles re-shaping the Owens Valley, Owens Lake is now reshaping the city of Los Angeles, by withdrawing water that would previously gone to feed the citizens of this metropolis.
David Maisel is an artist working in photography, video, and painting. In his multi-chaptered aerial photographic project, Black Maps, Maisel creates abstracted images of radically human-altered environments such as open pit mines, clearcut forests, water reclamation zones, and militarized landscapes of the American West. His series Library of Dust explores copper canisters of human ash remains transformed by time.
Maisel is the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2011 grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a 2008 Artist Residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a 2007 Scholar/Artist Residency from the Getty Research Institute. He has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Center for Cultural Innovation. Maisel was a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2011 through 2019.
His work is exhibited internationally and is held in more than fifty public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Getty Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Maisel’s work has been the subject of seven monographs, including Proving Ground (Radius, 2020), Mount St Helens: Afterlife (Ivorypress, 2018), Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime (Steidl, 2013), History’s Shadow (Nazraeli, 2011), Library of Dust (Chronicle, 2008), Oblivion (Nazraeli, 2006), and The Lake Project (Nazraeli, 2004).
Maisel received his BA from Princeton University and his MFA from California College of the Arts. The artist lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is represented by Houk Gallery (NY), Haines Gallery (San Francisco), Robischon Gallery (Denver), and Ivorypress Gallery (Madrid).
www.davidmaisel.com