Through a warren of chop shops, rag traders and junk yards, down a potholed ribbon of asphalt, in an abandoned, vacant lot in Little Haiti where three dead-end streets converge, artist Skip Van Cel has installed Maze, a 9 foot high, barbed wire topped chain link fence that cuts 66.6' feet diagonally across the desolate landscape.  The unfriendly nature of the location, the ambient white noise from traffic whooshing along I-95 a few blocks away and the convoluted path one must take to reach Maze all work in concert to create an environment of beautiful desolation. The Maze Van Cel refers to is in actuality the city’s entire street grid, which one must navigate, to view the work. The location, a most unlikely place for art, seeks to challenge the rarified, safe environment of the white-cubed gallery as exhibition space. In Van Cel’s Maze, the entire city is the exhibition space. Galleries often times display dangerous items within their confines, which makes it safe to observe. Here, the danger is the gallery and the danger is meant to be felt, not observed. Historically Mazes have been used to fuel spiritual quest, however the lineal, flattened characteristic of Van Cel's Maze addresses the point the maze is no more than a wall that must be circumvented as all walls ultimately are. Whereas the transparency of the chain link should render Maze lighter than something such as Serra's tilted arc (a work that was demonized by the press for its assault on the interruption of humans' ability to move from point a to b), but instead the chain link, because of its common usage to confine/exclude/incarcerate and/or restrict access, becomes heavier than a solid wall. 

Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, Donald Judd's Chinati and Robert Smithsons’ Spiral Jetty all require a journey to view. Maze seeks to tap into the spirit of that journey and to expand into a broader arena by using  the city's entire street grid as the maze and art as the holy grail at the center.