Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, collage, sculpture
Website: phillipmaisel.com
Phillip Maisel was born in 1981 in Chicago, Illinois, and lives and works in San Francisco, splitting time with Barcelona. He received a BS in Psychology from McGill University in Montreal in 2003 and an MFA in Visual Arts from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2013. He is a studio member at Minnesota Street Project and is represented by Casemore Gallery in San Francisco and Document in Chicago. His work was included in Charlotte Cotton's book Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015), and has been reviewed in Art Practical, Square Cylinder, Modern Painters, Lenscratch, and Fabrik Magazine. He completed a short-term residency at Hangar in Barcelona in 2020, which led to a sustained engagement with the city. His artist book Two Concrete Things, published with Chiquita Ediciones in Barcelona, received the Arts Libris–Fundació Banc Sabadell Award in 2021.
Maisel works at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and collage. His core method involves collecting everyday materials — paper, glass, mirrors, tape, Plexiglas, postcards, old photographs — and constructing ephemeral tabletop arrangements in shallow spaces, which he then photographs, adjusts, and rephotographs in iterative sequences. The sculptures themselves are never preserved; the photograph is the work. As the same objects are reoriented across a series of images, they accumulate visual weight through repetition and reappearance, creating a kind of still-life logic that is simultaneously precise and destabilizing. His work subverts the viewer's expectations of photographic space — what appears three-dimensional collapses into flatness on close inspection, and vice versa.
More recently, his practice has expanded to incorporate site-specific material collection and archival research. In his Parabolic Structures project, developed during extended time in Barcelona, Maisel wove together photographs of Montjuïc's old Jewish cemetery — whose gravestones were later repurposed as building material — with found images of Catalan families and his own family archive, producing a fragmentary visual meditation on displacement, memory, and what persists in absence.
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