May 18, 2024- Jan 5, 2025
David Maisel's work will be on view at the Austry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California in its gropu exhibited "Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West," presented by The Getty. "Out of Site" focuses on three technological revolutions to examine how visual technologies, artistic interventions, and the workings of state power have evolved in tandem with the Western landscape: wet-plate photography, used to theorize geological processes; the rise of aerial photography and pattern recognition; and the increasing use of drones, satellites, and other long-range photographic technologies to image secretive sites, military installations, and other technologically-mediated locales. The exhibition features eighty artworks, archival materials, and devices ranging from mammoth plate cameras to drones. The exhibit includes one of the enormous gridded aerial weapons testing pieces from David Maisel's Proving Ground (catalogue cover image). The show also juxtaposes Carleton Watkins’ Nevada mining photographs, nineteenth-century geological reports, and stereoviews, with Margaret Bourke-White’s aerial surveys published in LIFE magazine in 1936.
