MAISEL'S FINE ART SUMMER PART TWO

David Maisel's "Library of Dust" featured in group show at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible:   July 28 – Nov 11, 2007. A large-scaled image from Maisel's "Library of Dust"  is also featured through December 2007 in the reinstallation of the permanent photography collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Inside a dusty room in a decaying outbuilding on the grounds of a state-run psychiatric hospital are simple pine shelves lined three-deep with thousands of copper canisters. The canisters hold the cremated remains of mental patients who died at the hospital from1883 (the year the hospital was opened, when it was known as the Oregon State Insane Asylum) to the 1970’s, and whose bodies remained unclaimed by their families. The copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the seams of many of the cans. Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118.

The project's title is "The Library of Dust". As I was setting up to photograph in a storage building that houses the cremated remains, prisoners from the local penitentiary were called in to clean up some of the mess in the adjacent hallway, crematorium, and autopsy room. A young male prisoner leaned into the room lined with the copper cans, scanned the room, and said in a low tone, "The library of dust.”