Great fun! Very interesting viewing at the Haines Gallery: JUST ONE WORK | DAVID MAISEL's Air Force Target Grid Building photography.

JUST ONE WORK | DAVID MAISEL

In this ongoing series, Haines Gallery invites you to slow down and focus on a single artwork, which we’ll consider from a variety of perspectives. Today, we proudly present:

Air Force Target Grid Building

David Maisel, Air Force Target Grid Building, 2014 Six archival pigment prints, 2017 47 x 93 inches overall, framed

INQUIRE

David Maisel’s Air Force Target Grid Building is a single work comprised of six black-and-white photographs depicting a mysterious, stepped architectural construction seen against a vast desert. Shot from a variety of angles at ground-level, this ziggurat-like structure, with its evocative open door, remains both inviting and inscrutable, even as the landscape gradually unfolds around it.

“These sites reflect back the psyche of the society that made them, revealing something at the core of who we are.”

In fact, Maisel’s pristine, compelling images are part of Proving Ground, the artist’s 2015 series investigating the uncanny architecture and scarred terrain of a classified military site in a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. Established in 1942, the Dugway Proving Ground serves as a center for the development and testing of weapons and defense programs. Maisel was granted access to the site after more than a decade of inquiry to the Pentagon. The resulting body of work continues the artist’s longstanding interest in documenting humanity’s transformation of the landscape, as well as raising questions surrounding military power, land use, and national security. Maisel recently spoke to the BBC about the series here.

“It became a kind of enigmatic structure that condensed a lot of my interests in how Dugway uses the landscape in this hyper-rational way.”

The hauntingly beautiful images that make up this work depict a building that beckons viewers without affect. With its stark, matter-of-fact approach and gridded structure, the lineage of The Air Force Target Grid Building can be traced back to the work of photographers such as Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and others who would famously become associated with the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. This approach to photography focused on the seemingly mundane aspects of our built environment, transforming subjects such as track housing and water towers into evidence worthy of study and imbued with a surprising allure.  The Air Force Target Grid Building is at once an abstraction, a marker, and a system of measurement, built to be seen from above by Air Force pilots as they make their way over Dugway at extreme speeds. Maisel chanced upon his subject while driving and was immediately struck by its potential. He photographed the building from each side, just short of a full revolution: “There’s always some part of it that remains hidden,” the artist observes.

“Proving Ground is a complex examination of the choices we have made on how to use our Western lands and the implications of those decisions.”  Dr. Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography #hainesgallery#fineartmagazine#artfun