Shulamit Nazarian
Los Angeles, CA
Phillip Maisel
September 14 - November 11, 2016
Press Release:
Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Habitat, an exhibition of recent works by San Francisco-based artist Phillip Maisel. Habitat marks the artist’s
first solo exhibition in Los Angeles
While rooted in language of photography, Maisel’s practice traverses sculpture, collage, and installation. Never fully resigning itself to a single
medium, each piece meditates upon perception, while drawing on the framework of architecture and design.
Maisel selects objects—building materials, studio supplies, and personal artifacts that are embedded with distinct histories of use—and meticulously
arranges them into a temporary still life. In the controlled environment of the studio, Maisel photographs the tableau and makes subtle adjustments
between each frame by repositioning, introducing, or extracting elements; he captures each intervention sequentially before finally dismantling the
structures. The use of a digital camera provides the artist with an immediate view of the two-dimensional representation, and it is the flattened image,
not the objects themselves, that then inform subsequent photographs. Presenting the works in grids and small groupings reveals the nuanced
variations within each image.
In many of the artist’s new works, a doubling of object and image occurs when Maisel collages the documented materials to the surface of the
photographic print. The gesture complicates the relationship between representation and reality, asking the viewer to consider if image and material
are distinguishable. At times, the methodology is extended through a physical intervention of surface, as Maisel cuts, bends, and folds the
photographic paper.
The exhibition takes its title from the Habitat 67, an experimental residential structure designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie. Safdie’s
method of design, both modular and repetitive, correlates with Maisel’s working process and iterative compositions. The term also evokes the
domesticity of Safdie’s architectural space, and that of materials used in the construction of the Maisel’s assemblage-images. The root of the word
“habitat” means to possess, or to be situated, echoing the viewer’s process of negotiating the relationship between the pictorial space and the
physicality of the artwork’s surface.
Selections from Stack V, 2014. Archival pigment prints, 21.5" x 17.5"
Desert Hot Springs, 2016. Archival pigment prints, metal chain, filters, 30" x 20"
Jeanne and Claude, 2016. Cut archival pigment prints, neutral density filter, 28" x 22"
Jeanne and Claude (4008), 2016. Cut archival pigment print, 28" x 22"
Jeanne and Claude (3983), 2016. Cut archival pigment print, 28" x 22"
Jeanne and Claude (3943), 2016. Cut archival pigment print and neutral density filter, 28" x 22"
Desert Hot Springs (4699_1), 2016. Archival pigment print and neutral density filter, 30" x 20"
Desert Hot Springs (4699_2), 2016. Archival pigment print and metal chain, 30" x 20"
Desert Hot Springs (4699_4), 2016. Archival pigment print, metal chain, and neutral density filter, 30" x 20"
Desert Hot Springs (4846), 2016. Archival pigment print and colored filters, 30" x 20"