David Maisel: Proving Ground

DAVID MAISEL’s Proving Ground comprises aerial and on-site photographs made at Dugway Proving Ground, a vast military compound in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. A primary mission of Dugway is to develop, test, and implement chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. 

The Pentagon granted Maisel access to Dugway to photograph the terrain, testing facilities, and zones of toxic weapons deployment. Proving Ground is a critical response to the formal and political aspects of Dugway, in Maisel’s words, a “hidden, walled-off, and secret site that offers the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society.” 

David Maisel (b. 1961, New York) is an artist whose work spans photography, painting, and video. He is the recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, among other awards and honors. His work is represented in more than fifty public collections internationally and has been the subject of seven monographs.

Working with changes to the Earth as a constant subject for nearly four decades, with a global purview but a particular focus on the American west, Maisel is acutely aware that “we are on a perilous trajectory with regards to the environment and climate change.” His in-depth photographic series and video installations address the psychological and environmental impact of landscapes radically transformed by mineral extraction, natural resource reclamation, desertification, and military weapons testing. His large-scaled abstract paintings respond to the accelerating intensity of catastrophic climate change events such as wildfire and flood.

In this moment of planetary reckoning with the environmental consequences of human activity, Maisel’s photographs and paintings are both prescient and timely. Yet they are also strangely seductive, and Maisel does not shy away from the tension of this duality between acts of destruction and the formation of an aesthetic response. His images describe a world wholly remade by human activity; although visually resplendent, they are also spatially ambiguous and destabilizing, with aspects of beauty, fascination, and horror in equal measure.

An active lecturer, Maisel has spoken on his work at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment, the National Gallery of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the de Young Museum, the Pomona College Museum of Art, Middlebury College, Bates College, and, at in-person and online lectures and conversations sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and the National Museum of Natural History, among others. He has been a Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker at the School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, and has participated in symposia on his work organized by the New York Institute for the Humanities and Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Maisel holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He resides in San Francisco, CA.