#david maisel

x-ray of a classical statue

Tailings Pond 14, Vicinity of Pedro de Valdivia, Atacama, Chile, 2018

David Maisel

© David Maisel. Above:History’s Shadow AB3, 2010.

History’s Shadow, a new book by David Maisel (Nazraeli Press), examines art and artifacts through his photographs of museum conservation x-rays. Like spectral transmissions conveying messages across time, the images in History’s Shadow make the invisible visible – expressing the shape-shifting nature of time itself and the continuous presence of the past contained within us. “What do these works of art from past cultures have to teach us about our current point in human history or about our relationship to the past?,” writes Maisel in his essay. “The x-ray provides a filter and a means (much as perception itself is both filter and means) to read the intrinsic properties of these works, the trace elements with which these objects are imbued.” The book also includes X, Curator, a short story by Jonathan Lethem.

david maisel

David Maisel is a visual artist who recently completed a residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. It was there that he came across the museum's archive of X-rays, used in the process of conserving artwork. "The ghostly images of these X-rays," he writes, "seem to surpass the power of the original objects of art." And so he began to photograph them.