Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre

Richard Mosse
Senador José Porfírio, Pará, 2021
archival pigment print
83 x 67 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches each panel (framed)
83 x 208 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches overall triptych with 3" spacing (framed)

© Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

Jack Shainman Gallery
January 12 – March 16, 2024
46 Lafayette Street, New York

Capturing the exponential destruction of the Amazon from 2018-2022, Broken Spectre bears witness to a catastrophe that is playing out before our very eyes. Over the last fifty years, mass deforestation, willfully carried out by millions of people, has wiped out more than one-fifth of the original forest. Presented on a 60-foot-wide LED screen, with a multi-channel sound field, this dreamlike film installation shifts dramatically in scale and media to create a visceral and emotional connection with the world’s largest rainforest, the world’s last great reservoir of biodiversity, being devastated on multiple fronts for corporate profit.

Mosse reveals widespread localized environmental crimes through the prism of invisible systems of extractive violence, employing three discrete film media, each at a specific scale and wavelength, to articulate simultaneous spheres of rupture, on levels microscopic, interpersonal, and colossal. To reveal systematic environmental damage, Mosse films from the air using a specially designed multispectral video camera emulating those carried in remote sensing satellites. The human scale was filmed using 35mm black-and-white infrared film, evoking the Western film’s fraught iconography. The non-human is unveiled using ultraviolet microscopy, showing the bristling biodiversity to be found in just a few square inches on the forest floor.

more here: Jack Shainman