David Maisel, "Oblivion"

[Dave Monroe]

Novelist Thomas Pynchon likened the built environment
of Southern California to a computer circuit board
over 40 years ago in "The Crying of Lot 49."

The metaphor comes to life again in Bay Area
photographer David Maisel's series "Oblivion" at
Haines: black-and-white aerial views of the developed
Southern California, most of them in negative.

Unlike Robert Hartman, who discovers uncomposed
abstractions in aerial land-use views, or Michael
Light, in whose horizonless panoramas aesthetics and
social criticism contend, Maisel looks down with
almost extraterrestrial detachment. He knows that a
new kind of recognition has begun to dawn in popular
consciousness, a widening vision of the environmental
connectedness of everything the camera can see, from
aeronautical, even satellite, altitude. Zoom-in
surveillance is just one more expression of that
connectedness.

What was a metaphor when Pynchon conceived it has
turned increasingly literal, as nearly every household
and office in Maisel's wide views has multiple
computers, all connected through the Internet....

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/14/DDGGSP7S9R1.DTL

David Maisel

http://www.hainesgallery.com/Main_Pages/Artist_Pages/DMAI.bio.html

Haines Gallery

http://www.hainesgallery.com/Main_Pages/Exhib_Current.html

http://www.hainesgallery.com/

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