Melinda BarlowDistinguished scholar Melinda Barlow, Ph.D., will speak Thursday, Oct. 15, on the David Maisel “Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” exhibition currently on show at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Barlow is a scholar and historian of photography, film, video and multimedia. Her lecture, “The Scale of Imagination: David Maisel and the American Sublime,” is set for 6:30 p.m. in the Hess Family Lecture Hall, College of Arts and Sciences’ Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, 1221 10th Ave. South. Light refreshments will be on offer just before the lecture at 6 p.m.
“Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” is a solo exhibition surveying four chapters of American photographer and visual artist Maisel’s larger ongoing series, “Black Maps.”
The exhibition is presented by UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts and will be on display through Saturday, Nov. 14.
Barlow’s presentation situates Maisel’s extraordinary series within the history of the American sublime as it has been expressed within and across the arts of photography, film, video, painting, earthworks and poetry from the mid-19th through the early 21st centuries. Exploring aesthetic affinities and differences between works by the Hudson River School, Timothy O’Sullivan, Emmet Gowin, Robert Smithson, Terrence Malick, John Pfahl, Sally Mann and Wallace Stevens, among others, sets into relief the complexity and disquieting beauty of Maisel’s large-scale photographs of the American landscape as it has been radically reshaped by human intervention.
David Maisel, American (b. 1961), "The Lake Project 3, 2001," pigment print, 2012, 48 x 48 inches, A/P, Image courtesy of the artist, © David MaiselBarlow is associate professor of film studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she received the Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award, the Gold Best Should Teach Award, the Dean’s Senior Honors Teaching Fellowship and the Marinus Smith Award from the CU Parent’s Association. A film historian and curator who also researches the art of mentoring women, Barlow is the editor of Mary Lucier: Art & Performance (2000) and co-curator, with AEIVA Director Lisa Tamiris Becker, of “Primal Seen: Selections from the CU Art Museum’s Collection of Photography from the 19th Century to the Present” (2013).
Barlow is writing a book on film, art, female identity and the process of collecting titled “My Museum: A Memoir in Art,” featuring essays all recently published in the University of Texas at Austin online journal Flow.
Admission to AEIVA is always free. AEIVA is open to the public 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 12-6 p.m. Saturday and is closed Sundays and holidays. Call AEIVA at 205-975-6436 or visit online at uab.edu/cas/aeiva.