Arc of Fire: Richard Mosse brings together Richard Mosse’s immersive four-channel film Broken Spectre with over 25 of the artist’s striking large-format color photographs depicting both the extraordinary beauty and the accelerating destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Together, the photographs and film offer a powerful portrait of the environmental crisis unfolding in the Amazon while drawing attention to the technologies that shape how we perceive it.
Mosse’s photographs, created between 2018 and 2022, focus on the Amazon’s "Arc of Fire," the region in northwestern Brazil where deforestation is most intense. Made alongside these photographs, his monumental film Broken Spectre brings viewers into the rainforest at this critical moment. In just the last 50 years, twenty percent of the Amazon rainforest has been willfully deforested through burning carried out by mafia groups for cattle and soy agribusiness, as well as illegal hardwood logging and gold mining. The Amazon is now at a crucial tipping point where, within our lifetime, it could no longer generate enough rain to sustain itself, irrevocably shifting toward open canopy savannah and sometimes even desertification, emitting massive amounts of carbon stored in the dying forest’s biomass and trapped in the soil below, greatly multiplying global heating. This exhibition encourages visitors to look beyond the surface of the spectacular Amazon rainforest and confront the human, political, and ecological forces that are redefining it.
Images: Still from Broken Spectre XIII, Rondônia, 2022. Richard Mosse. Digital c-print. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Crepori River, Pará, 2020. Richard Mosse. Archival pigment print. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Acineta Superba II, 2019. Richard Mosse. Digital c-print mounted to dibond. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Intensive Cattle Feedlot, Rondônia, 2020. Richard Mosse. Archival pigment print. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Mineral Ship, Pará, 2020. Richard Mosse. Archival pigment print. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Burnt Pantanal I, Mato Grosso, 2020. Richard Mosse. Digital c-print. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Sawmill, Rondônia, 2020. Richard Mosse. Archival pigment print. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Senador José Porfírio, Pará, 2021. Richard Mosse. Archival pigment print. © Richard Mosse. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.