The Scale of Imagination:  David Maisel and the American Sublime

a lecture by Melinda Barlow

Thursday, Oct. 15, 6:30 pm in AEIVA’s Hess Family Lecture Hall

preceded by light refreshments at 6:00 pm 

Please join us for a special lecture by distinguished photography, film, video, and multi-media historian/scholar, Dr. Melinda Barlow, in conjunction with the David Maisel/Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime exhibition currently on view at AEIVA.

This multi-media presentation situates David Maisel’s extraordinary Black Maps series within the history of the American sublime as it has been expressed within and across the arts of photography, film, video, painting, earthworks, and poetry from the mid-19th through the early 21st centuries.  Exploring aesthetic affinities and differences between works by the Hudson River School, Timothy O’Sullivan, Emmet Gowin, Robert Smithson, Terrence Malick, John Pfahl, Sally Mann, and Wallace Stevens, among others, sets into relief the complexity and disquieting beauty of Maisel’s large-scale photographs of the American landscape as it has been radically reshaped by human intervention

Melinda Barlow, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she received the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award, the Gold Best Should Teach Award, the Dean’s Senior Honors Teaching Fellowship, and the Marinus Smith Award from the CU Parent’s Association.  A film historian and curator who also researches the art of mentoring women, Professor Barlow is the editor of Mary Lucier: Art & Performance (2000) and co-curator, with Lisa Tamiris Becker, of “Primal Seen: Selections from the CU Art Museum’s Collection of Photography from the 19th Century to the Present” (2013).  Professor Barlow is currently writing a book on film, art, female identity, and the process of collecting titled My Museum: A Memoir in Art, featuring the essays “When Sleepers Wake and Yet Still Dream,” “Without Warning,” “The Celestial Streetcar,” and “Who Was That Masked Woman?  Rediscovering the Hidden Mother,” all recently published in the University of Texas at Austin online journal Flow.  She received The Dorothy Martin Woman Faculty Member Award for her research on women artists, the Women Who Make a Difference Award from her students at CU, and The Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Award in Video Criticism from the Video Data Bank for her research on the early New York-based feminist multicultural performance collaborative Red, White, Yellow and Black.

IMAGE CREDITS:

1.

Melinda Barlow

2.

David Maisel, American (b. 1961); The Lake Project 15, 2002; pigment print, 2012; 48 x 48 inches; A/P; Image courtesy of the artist; © David Maisel