Terminal Mirage 4
Artist/Culture
David Maisel
(American, born 1961)
Date2003
Mediumchromogenic print
Dimensions121.9 x 121.9 cm (48 x 48 in.)
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineGift of Edward Osowski in honor of the photographer and the Eliza S. Paine Fund
Object number2005.102
Label TextIn 1970, conceptual land artist Robert Smithson developed a fascination with the concept of entropy, a scientific term that describes a system’s capacity for disorder. He identified a remote basin in Utah’s Great Salt Lake where he arranged 6,500 tons of rock and earth into a monumental coil, aware that it would soon be submerged in water due to the variability of the lake's depth. After remaining underwater for three decades, Spiral Jetty reemerged in the early aughts.
Equal parts arresting and alarming, Maisel's series Terminal Mirage “began as an homage to Smithson’s [Spiral Jetty], but it became something more complicated and much darker,” he wrote, adding: “The horizonless views of the Great Salt Lake may seem like pictures from an alien planet, but they are spaces that we, collectively, have made here on Earth…Terminal Mirage 4 is positioned in dialogue with evidence of one of the nation’s worst industrial polluters, seen in the toxic pond of Terminal Mirage 12, contaminated with dioxins at 150 times the legal limit.”On View
Not on view
