Angola was a Portuguese overseas territory from the 16th century to 1975. After independence, Angola was the scene of an intense civil war from 1975 to 2002. The country is the second-largest petroleum and diamond producer in sub-Saharan Africa; however, its life expectancy and infant mortality rates are both among the worst ranked in the world. In August 2006, a peace treaty was signed with a faction of the FLEC, a separatist guerrilla group from the Cabinda exclave in the North, which is still active. About 65% of Angola’s oil comes from that region.

This is how most of the people live there…

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Maisel’s aerial images of environmentally impacted sites explore the aesthetics and politics of open pit mines, clear-cut forests, and zones of water reclamation, framing the issues of contemporary landscape with equal measures of documentation and metaphor. As Leah Ollman states in the Los Angeles Times, “Maisel’s work over the past two decades has argued for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the damaged, the transmuted, the decomposed.”

Library of Dust depicts copper canisters containing the cremated remains of patients from a psychiatric institution. Vibrant minerals bloom on the urns’ surfaces, as the copper reacts with the ashes held within. The New York Times calls Maisel’s Library of Dust monograph “a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.”

History’s Shadow, Maisel’s current project, further explores the boundaries and essential properties of the medium, as he re-photographs x-rays of art objects, drawing from existing archives the spectral visions of past cultures. As always, Maisel seeks to render the invisible.

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Mel Ramos received his first important recognition in the early 1960s; since 1959 he has participated in more than 120 group shows. Along with other artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, Ramos produced art works that celebrated aspects of popular culture as represented in mass media. His paintings have been shown in major exhibitions of Pop Art in the U.S. and in Europe, and reproduced in books, catalogs, and periodicals throughout the world.

The classification of Ramos within any particular school of art is disputed. Some critical observers of the “art scene” classify Mel Ramos as a pop artist. However, others believe identification of Ramos’ work within the Pop movement of the 1960s implies a satirical or parodic bent which does not reflect the broader context of his paintings, and instead defend his “parodies” as respectful, affectionate tributes, a celebration of images with personal meaning.

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