Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Broken Spectre, an immersive video installation by Richard Mosse filmed in the Amazon Basin. Understanding the urgency of sharing Mosse’s seminal piece in the United States, this will be the first exhibition housed in the gallery’s new Tribeca location—situated in a multi-story 20,000 square-foot space in the Clock Tower Building at 46 Lafayette Street—which is slated to complete renovation in the fall of 2024. Opening for a limited preview on the occasion of exhibiting Mosse’s critical work for the first time in New York, this special presentation is an exciting glimpse into the gallery’s greatly anticipated restoration, and a fulfillment of Shainman’s commitment to activate the expansive site to platform the ambitious and prescient work of the artists they represent without delay.
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.
Broken Spectre is co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation, and by the Serpentine Galleries. Additional support provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery.
Jack Shainman Gallery, NY
46 Lafayette Street, New York
Opening reception on January 12 from 6–8PM
