Left to right: Left to right: Richard Mosse, Alexis Rockman (photo by Katherine Taylor)
A discussion between artists Richard Mosse and Alexis Rockman and the curators of our current exhibition, “Romance, Regret, and Regeneration in Landscape,” Anjuli Nanda Diamond and George Bolster. They will examine human impact on the environment related to the Anthropocene, the anthropause that occurred during Covid-19, and the curatorial impulses behind the exhibition currently on view.
Richard Mosse (b. 1980, Ireland; based in New York) is an artist who seeks to heighten and extend the language of documentary photography to draw attention to overlooked yet urgent stories, working with the aesthetic power of his medium to create highly collaborative, immersive and groundbreaking new forms in photography and the moving image. He often employs special photographic technologies to encode invisible aspects of historically significant subjects within the materiality of his imagery.Throughout his practice, Mosse has painstakingly documented environmental devastation in remote regions of the Amazon, the mass migration of refugees across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, bitter conflict over rare earth minerals in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the US military’s occupation of Saddam Hussein’s palace complexes in occupied Iraq, illegal immigration along the US-Mexican border, the missing persons crisis in post-war Balkan nations, and other subjects.
Alexis Rockman (b. 1962, New York) has depicted a darkly surreal vision of the collision between civilization and nature – often apocalyptic scenarios on a monumental scale – for over three decades. Rockman’s work is represented in many museum collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Grand Rapids Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New Orleans Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Whitney Museum of American Art. Rockman’s first solo exhibition with Sperone Westwater, “Evolution,” was presented in 1992. He has had subsequent solo exhibitions at the gallery in 2013, 2018, 2020-21 and 2023. He lives and works in Warren, Connecticut.