Subterranean Fire, Pantanal, 2020, archival pigment print, 59 x 91 inches (print), © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. — *Subterranean Fire, Pantanal*, 2020, archival pigment print, 59 x 91 inches (print), © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Richard Mosse: Tristes Tropiques

April 8 – May 15, 2021

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Tristes Tropiques, Richard Mosse’s expansive new body of work on view across the gallery’s 20th and 24th Street locations. Tristes Tropiques showcases a series of large-scale photographic maps which describe sites of environmental crimes unfolding across Brazil’s ‘arc of fire’. These vibrantly hued topographic images show frangible organic matter dominated by extractive violence at the hand of man. The colors are electric, yet, articulated over such highly detailed organic landscapes, powerfully reveal a highly vulnerable biome. They are living maps, showing signs of life, but also encapsulating forest die-back, tipping points and ecocide.

Employing geographic information system (GIS) technology, Mosse processed thousands of multispectral images captured above each site by drone to create searing maps that highlight areas of environmental attrition. Multispectral imaging is used by scientific groups to detect deforestation and ecological damage and pinpoint areas of concentrated CO2 release, toxic pollution, and other aspects of damage to the fragile ecosystem. Yet this powerful technology is also widely employed in agribusiness and mineralogy to more profitably exploit the environment. Mosse uses the medium reflexively, as an artist and a storyteller, to create maps that yield a disarming, gestural aesthetic force, while revealing traces of these complex ecological narratives, at turns geopolitical, multinational, local, and cultural, the effects of which can be difficult to perceive in time and space.

Mineral Ship, Para, 2020 archival pigment print, 65 1/2 x 59 inches (print), © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. — *Mineral Ship, Para*, 2020 archival pigment print, 65 1/2 x 59 inches (print), © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Tristes Tropiques is an example of what artist and cartographer Denis Wood has termed “counter mapping”, a form of resistance mapmaking intended to reveal endangered landscapes, describing human activities that threaten the entire Amazon and our global climate. In Subterranean Fire, Mosse’s camera vividly reveals the buried traces of fire advancing along desiccated underground roots in the Pantanal ecosystem, a quarter of which was lost to unprecedented fires last summer. The traces of subterranean fire cannot easily be seen by the human eye but are expressed here with the aesthetic power and scale of color field painting. In the diptych Juvencio’s Mine, the devastation of illegal gold mining practices carried out on a protected national forest reserve are exposed with irradiated clarity. In Aldeia Enawenê-nawê, the map reveals a recently contacted indigenous community’s cyclical engagement with their environment, one that produces little waste. Each map in Tristes Tropiques carries a wealth of data, showing the extractive processes, effects, and infrastructure along a vast, advancing front line of deforestation, land invasion, agribusiness, illegal mining and environmental crime.

Born in Ireland in 1980, Richard Mosse investigates the borders between documentary photography and contemporary art. Works from Tristes Tropiques, as well as Mosse’s critically acclaimed series Heat Maps and Infra will feature in Richard Mosse: Displaced, his first major survey exhibition, opening this spring at MAST Foundation, Bologna, Italy, accompanied by a comprehensive monograph. A second exhibition, examining his career in-depth, will open at Kunsthalle Bremen in 2022. An immersive video installation accompanying Tristes Tropiques is currently under production. Co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the VIA Art Fund, the work will debut in 2022. In association with this new project, Mosse has been awarded a 2021 remote residency with Arts at CERN in partnership with the Didier and Martine Primat Foundation and its special fund Odonata, Geneva. Past honors include the Prix Pictet (2018), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2014), representing Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011) among others. Recent solo exhibitions include Incoming at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2019), and the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2017).

Erwin Olaf, Im Wald, Der Schwan, 2020, courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery New York, USA — *Erwin Olaf, Im Wald, Der Schwan, 2020,* courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery New York, USA

Erwin Olaf: New Series April Fool And In The Forest

April 8 - May 22, 2021

Studio Erwin Olaf is pleased to announce several upcoming solo exhibitions and a forthcoming catalogue, all debuting in 2021. On April 8 Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York will open Erwin Olaf New Series: April Fool and In the Forest, and on May 14 the Kunsthalle München will open Strange Beauty, Olaf’s first retrospective in Germany. Strange Beauty will be accompanied by a new catalogue, released in the US on May 25. In addition, the Suwon Museum of Art in Suwon, Korea will open a solo exhibition by Olaf on December 14.

A photographer and multimedia artist, Olaf takes as hissubjectsociety’s marginalized individuals, including women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community, to explore everything from pressing social and political issues to more meditative aspects of human emotion, motivation, and thought. Drawing on the tropes of art history and cinematography, Olaf creates photographs, often using elaborate staging, costumes, and makeup, that toe the line between reality and fiction. Typically capturing his subjects mid-scene, Olaf creates works that convey a sense of mystery, insisting that viewers piece together gestures, glances, symbols, and iconography to consider and question what they see.

The exhibition at Edwynn Houk Gallery will feature works from two new series, Im Wald (In the Forest) and April Fool, that Olaf created over the past year. Inspired by the new reality of the Pandemic, Olaf turned to empty spaces - both natural and manmade - to explore ideas of waiting, transition, isolation, and travel. For his newest series Im Wald, Olaf traveled to the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, marking the first time that he has shot exclusively outside. The resulting body of black and white photographs explores the transient and migratory nature of humans, an impulse that has largely been paused this year.

Drawing on the works of 19th-century romantic painters, Olaf staged poetic scenes against the dramatic backdrop of the mountains and expansive forest. These highly stylized yet deeply intimate portraits offer only a fragment of his subjects’ story and allow Olaf to reflect on the indifferent power of nature, humankind’s arrogance towards the environment, and the enormous consequence of that short-sighted sentiment. Among the works on view will be Am Wasserfall, a re-imagining of the 1885 work 'Swimming' by Thomas Eakins. Evoking both the sublime found in nature, often captured by romantics like Eakins, and the vastness of the landscape reminiscent of Ansel Adams, the work features three nude figures at the base of a waterfall. The work reflects on the majesty and indifference of nature, and both the power and the powerlessness of humans in its presence. In Der Schwan, a young girl in a hijab stands holding an umbrella, floating on a swan-shaped boat in the middle of the lake. The photograph is both timeless and distinctly contemporary--the young girl is a tourist on holiday, and the outlandish boat stands out in stark contrast to the stoicism of the mountains blanketed in fog.

April Fool 2020 is a sequence of photographs that unfold over the course of a single morning in the spring of 2020. Overwhelmed by the dramatic impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Olaf turned to the now desolate space of the grocery store, creating a body of otherworldly

photographs in a once familiar place. Dressed as a modern Pierrot, Olaf cast himself as the protagonist and wandered the empty aisles and parking lot in a white dunce cap and black coat, staging eerie photos whose very subject is the absence of human activity itself. The theatrical compositions allude to a former world of commerce and exchange, vibrancy, and amusement, now still and largely abandoned. With works like 9:55am viewers confront a ravaged grocery store; its shelves empty from panicked buyers. Olaf stares grimly into a presumably empty freezer, while one other lone figure, her face also painted white, shops in the background. The fluorescent lights cast a sickly yellow glow on the floor, emphasizing the uncanniness of this once bustling place. The exhibition at Edwynn Houk will be available online through May 22, and visitors can also make an appointment to see the works in person.

Sandi Haber Fifield

As Birdsongs Emerge And The Certainty Of Nothing

April 15 – May 28, 2021

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present As Birdsongs Emerge and The Certainty of Nothing, an exhibition of two new bodies of work by artist Sandi Haber Fifield. The natural environment is used as source material and explored from the vantage point of each series. Throughout, Haber Fifield continues to employ juxtaposed images, layering, drawing, and collage to explore the visual, psychological, and formal possibilities of the photographic image.

In As Birdsongs Emerge, Haber Fifield expands upon the idea of the artist as an architect of nature. Recording and distilling her experiences through the camera lens, the photographs serve as the starting point for her studio process in which she begins to alter the images, cutting them into geometric and organic shapes, then reassembling them in playful, overlapping layers to transform the representation of the perceivable world while pushing the expressive boundaries of the medium. The compositions offer segments and shards of recognizable signifiers – palm fronds, cactus buds, rose bushes – that are spliced, layered, and abstracted into arrangements and associations that slow down the act of looking. Haber Fifield exploits the tension between the plane of the cut photograph and the three-dimensional depth of the imagery, expanding the photographic space while creating multiple points of entry. The viewer is challenged to use their eyes, mind, and memories to navigate the picture plane and question the strata of seeing.

The Certainty of Nothing stands as a visual and philosophical counterpoint to As Birdsongs Emerge, and is inspired by an extended visit to Angkor, the ruins of the Khmer Empire in northern Cambodia. In these ancient sites, nature dictates. Haber Fifield delves into the frailty of human civilization as the forces of entropy and the darker side of nature are brought to the fore. The photographic palette is pushed to the extremes; shadows are encapsulated in fathomless purples and blacks, and the sunlight of the primeval forest is bleached into an ephemeral, otherworldly pastel. Visual and haptic are interwoven as Haber Fifield connects surface and image with the addition of hand-drawn marks, slices, and tears, extending the light and line in the photographs. The images are imbued with the transformative inertia of time and nature. A contemporary response to the timelessness of Angkor, The Certainty of Nothing acknowledges the inevitability of nature’s reclamation of this city back to the elemental energy from which it came, and humanity’s inability to anticipate events they cannot control.

Sandi Haber Fifield was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1956, and she lives and works in New York. Her work is the subject of four monographs: The Certainty of Nothing (die Keure); After the Threshold (Kehrer Verlag); Between Painting and Picking (Charta); and Walking through the World (Charta). Haber Fifield’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States including The Art Institute of Chicago; The De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Oakland Museum; The Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL; and The St. Louis Museum. Her work is included in numerous major public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The High Museum, Atlanta. This is Haber Fifield’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Events

Claire Rosen: Threads of an Artist Approach

Artist Talk

April 10

4411 Montrose Boulevard Suite C, Houston, TX

Join Visual Arts Alliance Saturday, April 10, at 11:00 a.m. for a live discussion with Claire Rosen, “Threads of an Artist Approach,” facilitated by author Catherine Anspon. This program will be live streamed on VAA’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/visual.arts.alliance/ live/.

Journey into the imagination of artist Claire Rosen — following the threads woven through her varied body of work; from fantastical animal banquets to poetic still lives. She will share the inspiration, artistic practices, and passions that underpin her creative work, and the adventures and misadventures they have invited into her life.

Claire Rosen is an internationally recognized and widely collected artist, her portfolio of elaborate tableaus often feature anthropomorphic animals, archetypal heroines, or still lives steeped in symbolism that’s evocative of classical European painting. Though the work is rooted in traditional themes and aesthetics, it is intended to create dialogue around contemporary issues such as environmental conservation and the need for animal advocacy.

Rosen is represented by Foto Relevance in Houston, TX.

Photography and Racial Justice: Honoring the work of Maurice Berger

Panel Discussion

April 13, 6:30-8:30pm

214 East 21st Street New York, NY

The School of Visual Arts, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department welcomes you to a panel discussion in honor of celebrated historian, curator, and critic Maurice Berger. Featuring Deborah Willis, Brian Palmer, and Nona Faustine, this panel will examine issues that were central to Berger’s concerns and scholarship, namely the relationships between photography and racial justice.

From his scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement to his writings on the work of Gordon Parks, Berger’s work makes clear the central role of photography in the advancement of racial justice. Covering the fields of history, activism, photojournalism, and art, the panelists will explore how photography helps us reckon with issues of race and representation in the United States.

Jon Conzo Jr. ‘born In The Bronx’

Artist Talk

April 24

614 Courtlandt Ave Bronx, NY

Saturday, April 24th – 6PM

Join photographer Joe Conzo Jr. as he presents his iconic body of work documenting the birth of hip hop in the Bronx and the rerelease of his book Born in the Bronx: A Visual History of the Birth of Hip Hop. Hip Hop pioneer and legend GrandmasterCaz will join Conzo for the talk.

Hip hop first became a part of the mainstream music industry in the early 1980s, when major record labels released albums from such accessible groups as Run DMC and the Sugarhill Gang. But the true origins of one of the most powerful pop-cultural influences in the world are in the spontaneous, progressive musical culture that grew out of tough Bronx neighborhoods of the 1970s and led to a renaissance of poetry, music, and fashion.

Through years of research, writer and curator Johan Kugelberg has pulled together the scattered remains of a movement that never had its eye on posterity. The book includes the improvisational artwork of previously unpublished street flyers of the era, Polaroids buried for decades in basements across the Bronx, and testimonials from influential figures such as Tony Tone, LA Sunshine, and Charlie Chase. Through the work of pioneering hip-hop photographer Joe Conzo–the man The New York Times calls “the chronicler who took hip hop’s baby pictures”–Born in the Bronx presents a unique introduction to an explosive and experimental period in music history.

Conzo co-authored Born In The Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop in 2007, which has long been out of print. This new expanded edition is published by 1XRUN.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

Please note this will be a socially distanced in-person event.

The event will be held in the BDC’s Community Garden, which is located adjacent to the BDC Annex building at 364 E. 151st St, Bronx.