Michael Light: Near Planet

Five new large-scale, handmade artist’s books centerpiece San Franciscan Michael Light’s ongoing aerial photographic investigation into the complex landscapes of the American West. Shot with a large-format camera from small, self-piloted aircraft and rented helicopters, Near Planet highlights Light’s vision of vast, stunning beauty coupled with the bleakest realities of human manipulation of the environment.

Meditating on scale, geology, hubris and our insatiable hunger for materials,”Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack 04.21.06″ examines the world’s largest man-made hole, a copper mine outside Salt Lake City, Utah, and the nearby Garfield Smelter Stack, the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River. “Rancho San Pedro 04.28.06” is a survey of the southern Los Angeles basin shot in color that focuses on oil extraction, refining, global shipping, automobile transportation, and land use in LA’s most blighted cities of Compton, Carson, and Dominguez. The work shows a world of utter human transformation, yet still connected to history, and suffering the beauty of green growth each spring.

Other books explore the Mono Craters of Mono Lake, California; the Nevada valleys of Silverpeak and Walker Lake; and the blasted remains of Bikini Island in the South Pacific.

Each book encapsulates an element of performance, in that it is comprised of a single flight of intense observation. The darkness permeating the work — not only the inky blacks, but the edge of despair — is tenuously contained by the undeniable majesty, and even endurance, of the natural world, however marred and altered.