You can read more about Black Maps here, but in brief, this book has been years in the making and represents a crucial survey of Maisel’s signature aerial work. The book contains 115 four-color and tritone images that span his career, presenting a hallucinatory worldview that encompasses both stark documentary and tragic metaphor. Maisel’s photographs of environmentally impacted sites consider the aesthetics of open pit mines, clear-cut forests, rampant urbanization and sprawl, and zones of water reclamation.

The book’s six sections are accompanied by essays by key critics and curators—including Julian Cox, Natasha Egan, Geoff Manaugh, Kirsten Rian, Joseph Thompson, Kazys Varnelis, and myself—comprising an eclectic array of poetic, historical, and critical texts.

A major Black Maps exhibition is touring as well, starting February 9, 2013 at the CU Art Museum at Boulder and traveling to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art on June 1. Events related to the book and exhibitions will be announced here as they develop.

Taken in locations throughout the United States and Europe over the course of more than a decade, Stages of Decay is renowned investigator of ruined spaces Julia Solis’s most ambitious project so far. One of the most accomplished contemporary artists who uses abandoned spaces as both subject and site for creative activity, Solis’s perspective is that of a last audience member, viewing the final spectacle of decrepitude. All of the photos focus on the theater stages and the secondary ornamentation they acquire from the patches of mold, crumbling plaster, rotting stage curtains, and collapsing roofs. Stages of Decay provides a view to what happens after the final curtain has dropped.

Numerous theaters depicted here either no longer exist or have since deteriorated or been vandalized almost beyond recognition. This series not only documents the various sites of entertainment in Western culture, but also serves as a historic record of numerous formerly famous places.

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