Michael Light: Hover

Michael Light explores the aesthetic frontiers of landscape in this exhibition of recent aerial photographs. “Some Dry Space” is a series of large black and white photos of the Southern California and Nevada deserts taken from an airplane flying at 300 to 1000 feet in elevation. While some images have identifiable features and a familiar perspective of foreground receding to background, many are abstract to the point of appearing like lunar topography or pristine, snowcovered fields. Shimmering light and velvety blacks transform these images into anything but arid wasteland.

“Los Angeles 02.12.04” extends the survey of desolate wilderness to the sprawling metropolis. These photographs, also black and white, and shot from a helicopter, share an unexpected resemblance to the gorgeous, barren vistas of “Some Dry Space.” The snaking lines of freeways, tiny specks of cars, and low circular Unocal oil refineries echo the fissures, ridges, rivulets, and low scrubby bushes of Chidago Canyon, Montgomery Creek, and the Volcanic Tablelands.

This work is a natural extension of Light’s previous projects. In FULL MOON, Light printed large-scale color photographs from NASA transparencies of the first space missions, creating a profound new view of the lunar terrain and the spectacular effects of light in the vacuum of space. In 100 SUNS, Light rephotographed images of US nuclear bomb tests, offering an unsettling perspective, at once seductive and terrifying, of the power of the sun unleashed on remote desert test sites.