Richard Mosse "Airside"
Jack Shainman Gallery
This event has ended.
This series of photographs is expedient in locating the air disaster within our cultural imagination. It offers a strategy of deferred representation with the aim of looking sideways at actual disaster – mere moments of contingency, adrenaline, and confusion ending in death or forgetting. The work’s objective is to show the disaster’s spectacle. In the place of accident, it reads disaster as willed and anticipated, formally realized and rehearsed. Sinister air disaster simulators, charred and phallic, sit virtually unnoticed in our airports. They are monuments built in order to inflate rather than assuage our own fear. These hyper-functional, automatic sculptures – military in form – speak of mass anxiety, routine submission to terrible fear, as well as our desire to see, to experience an air disaster. Moments of ambiguity and quietly authentic images of actual disasters and planned military interventions cut through the body of work, creating a disorienting narrative of the modern age that draws on ancient myths of flying and falling.
Media
Schedule
from November 13, 2008 to December 20, 2008