NEWS
Twelve thousand years ago most of the Great Basin––that part of the country between California and Utah where water does not drain to the ocean—was 900 feet underwater, covered by two vast and now largely evaporated historical lakes, Bonneville and Lahontan. The shrunken remnants of Lake Bonneville today are the Great Salt Lake in Utah and its eponymous salt flats, while the best known portion of the former Lake Lahontan is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, an alkali bed that floods and dries each year, creating the flattest topography on earth, home to the annual counterculture festival Burning Man.
Piloting his 600-pound aircraft at low elevations, Light explores this mythic space deeply and abstractly, finding in the emptiness as much evidence of our presence as absence—and revealing heretofore unseen palimpsests of vehicular and urban glyphics that come and go with the seasons. Reflecting Light’s ongoing survey themes of mapping, perceptual orientation, and human impact on the land, but in a newly minimal and psychological direction, Lake Lahontan | Lake Bonneville offers an elegiac and forceful look at the politics of erasure.
CURRENT AND RECENT
NEW INSTITUTIONAL ACQUISITION:
2020 Denver Art Museum, 59”x 74” image from Lake Bonneville, edition 2
NEW BOOK:
2019 Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville; Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM
SOLO SHOWS:
2019 “Michael Light: Gardiner’s Island and Amagansett,” The Drawing Room, East Hampton, NY
2019 “Michael Light: FULL MOON,” Danziger Gallery, New York
2019 “GLOW: Michael Light’s Views of L.A.,” Los Angeles Public Library
2019 “Great Basin Autoglyphs and Pleistoseas,” Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2018 “Michael Light: Sidereal Rift,” San Francisco Airport Terminal Three, San Francisco
GROUP SHOWS:
2020 “Abstraction: New Acquisitions,” Denver Art Museum, CO
2020 “Fotobokfestival Oslo 2020,” Oslo, Norway
2020 “Civilization, Photography, Now,” Auckland Art Gallery/Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand
2019 The Observable Universe: Visualizing the Cosmos In Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA
2019 “The Stories They Tell: 100 Years of Photography,” Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA
2019 “The Moon,” Geelong Gallery, Geelong/Melbourne, Australia
2019 “Moon,” FOMU Foto Museum, Antwerp, Holland
2019 “Moonlight,” Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden
2019 “The Final Frontier,” Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto, CA
2019 “Dear Leader,” Candela Gallery, Richmond, VA
2019 “Vantage Points: Bartos, Diergarten, Light,” The Drawing Room, East Hampton, NY
2019 “Civilization: The Way We Live Now,” Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
2018 “MONUMENTality,” Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
2018 “Survols: Aerial Photography of Cities,” CAUE 92 Gallery, Nanterre, France
2018 “Civilization: The Way We Live Now,” National Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art, Seoul Korea
PRESS:
2019 Feuerheim, Brad, “2019: A Short Guide to White People & Their Photography Books, American Suburb X, December
2019 Reed, Rixon, “2019 Favorite Photobooks,” Photo-Eye, December, Santa Fe
2019 Mallonee, Laura, “The Traces of Human Activity in the Burning Man Void,” Wired.com, September, New York
2017 Porges, Maria, “Michael Light at Palo Alto Art Center,” Square Cylinder, August, San Francisco
2016 Kroeber, Gavin, “Suburban Futurism,” Art In America, December
2016 Muller-Bohle, Andreas, “Urbanics: The Contemporary City,” European Photography 98, Berlin
2016 Loftus-Farren, Zoe, “Remnants of the American Dream,” Earth Island Journal, Winter
2015 Baker, Kenneth, “Night Begins The Day” at Jewish Museum, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10
INTERVIEWS:
2019 Jo, Alexandra, “Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville: An Interview with Michael Light, Photo Eye, December
2015 Green, Tyler, “Podcast #214: Curator Ann Wolf with Artists Mike Light and Mark Klett,” Modern Art Notes