Hasta La Ideas

Deadstock film recaptures a decades-old conflict in a new exhibition

As pro-am DSLRs and post production software make photography increasingly accessible, photographer Richard Mosse seems set on making his life more difficult. Armed with dead-stock Kodak infrared film—originally developed to detect camouflage for military aerial surveillance—Mosse ventured into the heart of the Congo to take some pictures. The forty-year-old technology was a cumbersome addition to his rural exploration, with Mosse playing the role of a time-traveling photographer under the hood of his camera. Consciously drawing from the photojournalistic tradition, Mosse’s collection “Infra,” on display at NYC’s Jack Shainman Gallery through 23 December, is a revisitation of familiar themes. He plays a dangerous game, trying to imbue life into themes so commonplace that viewers have become apathetic. The result is a new meditation on the problematic genre of photojournalism in regions plagued by conflict, one that uses art to decontextualize the familiar.

The obvious narrative is simple. Hardened rebels stand among expanses of eye-popping magenta, a comic irony that contradicts the gravity of war. Mosse is using a discontinued technology to revisit an old yet ongoing problem, creating a dialogue between the generations of inhabitants affected by war and the omnipresent lens of western civilization. “Infra” forces the viewer to look with fresh eyes at images to which they have become blind. This experience holds true not only for viewers, but for Mosse as well. Without the perspective of his camera’s infrared film, Mosse experienced his subjects for the first time during development.

Beyond the political ramifications of his work, Mosse’s images are compositionally stunning. His ability to find geometry in figures and landscapes is especially apparent in infrared, where the contours of trails and human limbs soberly interrupt the mass of color. While child soldiers supply the initial interest, Mosse’s landscapes are the surprise pleasure of the exhibition. Vegetation gives off a high amount of infrared light, which makes the Congo’s lush terrain a particularly gorgeous subject for Mosse’s lens. A stunning 3×3 series showcases the fragile structures of the Congo, lending valuable insight into village life.

The project marks an ongoing fixation for Mosse and next year the photographer will return to document the texture of the Congolese topography. To catch his current work, check out the exhibition at Jack Shainman, on display through 23 December 2011. A monograph of Infra is also available from Aperture for $80.

Images courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

A children’s story on lessons learned from Mary Jane

Ricardo Cortés has a gift for charming us with the uncomfortable. Recent praise for his illustrations in the bedtime gem “Go the Fuck to Sleep” created quite the stir this past summer, and the author has now released the third edition of “It’s Just a Plant,” previously unavailable in hardcover and running upwards of $100 for sold-out past editions. The book tells the story of a young girl’s education in cannabis as explained by her parents, a doctor and a friendly gang of Rastafarians. Tackling difficult concepts like criminalization and recreational drug use, Cortés’s introduction provides a mature but still cheeky way to inform children on the status of drugs in society.

“It’s Just a Plant” counters the tendency to avoid uncomfortable topics in family discussions, giving liberal-minded parents an illustrated adventure story to express to their kids their stance on such polemic issues. The third edition also includes new illustrations and edits to the original text. Contributing artists for the new edition include Futura , José Parlá, Too Fly, Smarcus, and V. Court Johnson.

The hardback is available for $20 from the book website. You should also look out for Cortés’s next book “Coffee, Coca & Cola,” which is currently in the works.

A sound architect’s latest projects debut with musical fanfare at Miami’s Art Basel festivities

Artist Christopher Janney merges jazz and architecture with a rare balance of logic and imagination, describing his unique method as “painting with sound.” The trained composer is concerned with providing an emotional element to physical structures—to Janney, buildings are “urban musical instruments,” and over the past three decades he has built up an impressive array of site-specific works, from public installations in Miami to an 8,000-square-foot home in Kona according to the “cosmological principles and rhythms of Hawaii.”

Janney’s pedigree boasts a degree in architecture from Princeton and a Masters in Environmental Art from MIT, but he maintains a southern charm reminiscent, in a way, of Bill Clinton when he describes his work as “a gas” and discusses musical tastes from Motown to Zappa. He dissects pieces of Mozart with the ease of a genius composer, but takes a leap from conventional musical expression by visualizing the notes as multi-colored glass installations that refract light in delirious, fantastical ways. In the recently published retrospective book on his work, Janney comments, “I am interested in creating a hyperreality—a place where a person is still aware of being in his normal environment, but elements of it have been heightened or altered—to invite a more interesting daily experience, as well as to push against the idea of urban alienation.”

One of Janney’s most well-known projects to date is his 1995 installation at the Miami International Airport, a cornucopia of colored glass that lined the windows of the 180-foot moving walkway. Dubbed “Harmonic Runway,” the large-scale work was unfortunately removed due to new safety regulations following September 11, 2001.

Now, Janney has created a new light and sound installation at MIA that heralds the vibrant spirit found in Runway but packs an even bigger punch by using the innovative Vanceva glass system. “Harmonic Convergence” will project to travelers passing through a palette of more than 150 transparent colors alongside sounds recorded in Florida Everglades and on ocean SCUBA dives. The density of the sound score fluctuates in accordance to pedestrian activity, which is tracked via two video cameras installed in the ceiling. Topping off the experience is the rap of a short drum beat every hour to mark the time.

The permanent installation, “Harmonic Convergence” is ready to view in Miami, where you can also check out an exhibition highlighting Janney’s three main areas of focus—”Urban Musical Instruments,” “Physical Music” and “Performance Architecture.” Taking the same name as his new book, “Architecture of Air,” the showcase will also be on view during Art Basel (29 November – 4 December 2011) at the Moore Building in the Miami Design District. Those in town for the art extravaganza will not want to miss his concert on 2 December at 9pm, where Janney will perform with The Persuasions in a show called “Disembodied Instruments (Dance Version).”

As a guy who still marvels, “Wow, I made that?” Janney is a driving force in advancing technology and experimenting with the way we react to the world around us, surprising even himself from time to time.

An online gallery streamlines the interaction between users and content

Hastening to bridge the gap between traditional media’s tendency to over-curate and the Internet’s overflow of content, Melissa Jones has relaunched Dream the End, an online space for art, music, poetry and film. With a homepage curated by guest editors, the site will update regularly as new virtual “editions” are released. The content comes from a mix of emerging artists and lesser-known figures from the past, with exclusive mixtapes available for streaming. It’s a great way to escape from quotidian demands and browse creative interests without the deluge of commentary and criticism.

Dream the End is unique in that it isn’t set up in a rational, linear browsing interface but rather resembles a cloud, with content scattered around a page lacking typical navigation features. Clicking on a piece of art will take you to a gallery of that artist’s work, and selecting a few lines from a poem will show you the piece in its entirety, accompanied by a blurb about the artist. The “random view” button at the bottom of every page redirects to a new homepage with different content, so the browsing possibilities are endless. All the while, because the site’s streaming music isn’t page-specific, visitors can enjoy listening to new music while they explore other mediums.

The widely appealing art selection includes an impressive range of works, from Sean Kerman’s “Female Lying,” a muted image Jones excerpted from a ’70s-era photography reference book on the human figure, and “Hand,” a recent piece by Chinese artist Hai Tien that harkens tranquil tropical flowers; to the more contemporary styles of Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser, whose minimalist black-and-white piece “Ad B4” juxtaposes with Rupprecht Geiger’s bold “Geist Und Materie 1,” an example of artist’s late geometric-inspired work, which he painted at the age of 96.

“As an antidote to the increasingly chatter-driven online environment, I wanted the design of the site to be a uniquely distilled sensory experience,” says Jones in a press release. “Dream the End is where people can see what’s good and hear what’s good, and not just read about it.” The success of Dream the End lies in its simplicity. The layout requires users to follow their interests around the site without worrying about what is current, relevant, or otherwise popular.

Refresh!, the first edition of Dream the End is now live and ready to browse.

A commercial photographer turns to a laboratory in this collection of foodie art

Driven by recent concerns over the nature and origin of our daily bread, Caren Alpert set out to examine common foods on a more intimate level. Armed with a scanning electron microscope, the photographer undertook Terra Cibus, her largest project to date. Commenting on the equipment used to take her shots, Alpert explains, “This is not something you put on a counter at a lab and you look through an eyepiece. It’s the size of a small bedroom.” Without an academic background in science, Alpert spent the first three months researching the equipment that would be necessary to photograph the microscopic surfaces of foods.

The process was involved, and Alpert had to rely on the help of a technician in Arizona while she curated and sent samples from the Bay Area. Foods need to be dehydrated first and coated with different metals before they are ready, a process that can take 2-6 weeks. When the samples were ready to shoot, Alpert would travel to Arizona. The process of shooting didn’t look anything like a normal photo shoot, in which hundreds of shots can be rattled off in a few hours. It could take a day to get a dozen images, and traversing the surface of the food was painstakingly slow at high magnifications. The sensitivity of the machine was another matter. Situated at the far end of the building from the elevator, Alpert explains, “The slightest bit of movement can affect the machine during a capture.” Working within these constraints, Alpert was able to produce some of the most fascinating food photography in recent memory.

A commercial photographer by trade, Alpert makes her fine art debut with Terra Cibus. “Everything came out of this naturally,” she explains. “I had no idea what I was going to get when I started this project. I honestly had no idea what the scanning electron microscope could produce, so everything from the word ‘go’ was a surprise to me and very serendipitous.” The results are stunning, and often elicit a double-take from the viewer. With fortune cookies that resemble martian landscapes and shrimp tails that look like bird feathers, the images were often surprising to Alpert herself. “When I shot that shrimp tail, obviously I was flabbergasted by what I saw and couldn’t figure out why shrimp have feathers. I was so caught up in this question that I called up the Monterey Bay Aquarium.”

The name Terra Cibus roughly translates as “nurturing from the earth,” and so it’s appropriate that the photographs of sustenance resemble familiar terrains. Alpert recalls reading the children’s science magazine 3-2-1 Contact, which used to have abstracts of everyday life for children to identify with a guess. Her work has a similar effect, relying heavily of the viewer’s subjective experience. Looking at one of her pieces, it’s often hard to classify it as food, art, science or simply technological exploration.

A large portion of the work is on display at the James Beard Foundation in New York, and prints can be purchased by contacting the artist directly through her website.

More images from the show and a description of each of the works in the gallery after the jump

All images copyright Caren Alpert

terra cibus no. 23: purple onion

terra cibus no. 18:sugar

terra cibus no.4: fortune cookie

terra cibus no.32: shrimp tail

terra cibus no.10: kiwi seed