“The Lake Project” presents large scale aerial photographs and video projection/soundscape by David Maisel. The photographs, made between 2000 and 2004, are complex, abstracted maps of the Owens Valley, a terrain created by the diversion of the waters of Lake Owens to the municipal water system of Los Angeles and by subsequent EPA amelioration. The photographs, taken from a small plane, combine geography, geology, cartography, and industrial archaeology. The presentation—large scale color prints and video projection—offers a majestic, almost horrifyingly beautiful, vision of destruction and intervention. “The Lake Project” is at once an archive of geographical transformation and a vision of the sublime."
History/Science/Technology: The Hoover Collection of Mining and Metallurgy, a selection of early illustrated scientific and technical treatises, is presented as a compliment to “The Lake Project.” The superb collection formed by Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover and held by Honnold/Mudd Library of The Claremont Colleges, enshrines the Hoovers’ intellectual interest in the history of extractive sciences and technologies. The emphasis mirrors the high esteem in which geography, geology, mining, hydrology, and associated earth sciences were held, an amalgam of science and technology which would reconfigure the American West.
The two exhibitions are presented in conjunction with the 2005/06 Hart Institute for American History lecture series, “American Science
