Gallery shows aerial shots of environmental impacts

In conjunction with the Whatcom Museum’s exhibition “Vanishing Ice,” Western Washington University’s Western Gallery will present a survey of David Maisel’s major aerial photography projects: “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” through Feb. 14, with a special lecture given by Maisel at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 22, in Academic West Room 210.

In these large-scaled photographs, Black Maps leads the viewer on a hallucinatory journey through terrains that have been radically altered by environmental issues and transformed by human agency. Maisel’s aerial images of environmentally impacted zones frame the issues of contemporary landscape with equal measures of documentation and metaphor, beauty and despair.

David Maisel is one of the preeminent landscape photographers today, whose work is collected and exhibited internationally. This exhibition was organized by the University of Colorado Art Museum; the exhibit’s curators are Lisa Tamiris Becker, director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and Helmut Müller-Sievers, Eaton Professor of Humanities and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at University Colorado at Boulder.

Western Gallery hours are Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m.