Kim Keever & David Maisel

Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce Kim Keever & David Maisel, two solo exhibitions of new photography. There will be an opening on Saturday October 23rd from 4-7pm at the gallery with both artists present.

Kim Keever's large-scale photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.

Keever's painterly panoramas represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing a broad history of landscape painting, especially that of Romanticism, the Hudson River School and Luminism, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime. However, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. Keever's staged scenery is characterized by a psychology of timelessness. A combination of the real and the imaginary, they document places that somehow we know, but never were.

David 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 the sites he works with are often remote and inaccessible, Maisel frequently works from an aerial perspective, thereby permitting images and photographic evidence that would be otherwise unattainable.

This exhibition will focus on "The Terminal Mirage" and "The Lake Project" series by Maisel. Both of these series survey the tensions between nature and culture that are typical in Maisel's photographs. In The Lake Project (2001-2002), David Maisel documents the human destruction of California's Owens Lake, destroyed in 1926 by the Los Angeles Aqueducts. The aerial photographs of the lake present the viewer with images that are both awe inspiring and unsettling. The artist's aerial views scramble traditional depictions of the landscape, turning images of environmentally ravaged land into vast abstract fields. Terminal Mirage (2003-2005) continues the artist's investigation of the impacted environment transforming aerial views of polluted lands and bodies of water into planes of saturated color, belying their foreboding subject matter.