Today’s feature is brought to you by our friends at Flavorwire, where Marina Galperina speaks to Richard Mosse about his infrared photographs of war-torn Congo.

Men Of Good Fortune, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011. Photo credit: Richard Mosse

A military village emerges from the hills of hot pink. A soldier lurks in a crimson jungle. A man with a face erupted in scar tissue from a war trauma pauses for a portrait. Photographer Richard Mosse has captured the Congo using Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued military surveillance film used to detect an invisible spectrum of infrared light, warping the hues of green into a landscape of lavender and revealing much more than an image shot on typical film would.

The Ireland-born photographer’s striking new series Infra — on view through December 23 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City — documents a land of turbulent, shifting politics, systematic massacres, and unrelenting physical and sexual violence. These photographs are devastating in their reality and hauntingly beautiful in their creative form.

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Next to Nothing: On the Price of Nothing and the Value of Everything is an exhibition by Black Dogs, an art collective comprising members based primarily in Leeds and London that interrogates the notion of art produced for social transformation and develops platforms for art production and presentation to exist outside and against the values of a capitalistic art system. This approach is apparent both through the issues represented in their projects, as well as their methods of self-organization that emphasize collaboration and not-for-profit motives. Next to Nothing, resulted from a series of collective meetings around notions of value and led to the exhibition in Leeds. This second edition is currently presented at the +44 141 Gallery, SWG3 in Glasgow till 2 December 2011.

Lisa Bristow and Christian Lloyd, Destination Goods; Courtesy of Black Dogs

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In grad school, my studio was kiddie-corner from Feodor (or Theo) Voronov’s. I was always there and he was there more often than I was. I respect smart people who do the work, or people who are smart because they do the work, and seeing them get better and better and get recognized for it is sort of a thrill — it means the world can make sense sometimes. Theo’s first solo show at Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City opens in January, and all the paintings shown here will be included in that. But we didn’t specifically talk about the show. We talked instead about method.

Feodor Voronov, "Insurgent", 2011, 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

Catherine Wagley: This morning, a friend and I were talking about abstraction that’s transcendent, but transcendentally funny, like kick-ass stand-up. I thought of you, and pulled up your “Pellucid” painting on Google as an example. It’s seriously crafted, seriously systematic, but doesn’t take itself that seriously. How’d you start working with words?

Feodor Voronov: I started working with words about one year after graduate school. I most of all wanted to step away from grad school work, which started to feel dated, short sighted and just way too safe. I initially was attracted to just the raw physical power of text, and I attempted a few pieces where I would build these circular patterns by first translating words into ancient runes and then using the result to begin the process of building a composition. Pretty soon, I realized this was all too cautious and gimmicky. So I decided to see what would happen if I just put an English word in the middle of the canvas and forced myself to deal with it being there. It seemed too simple and really goofy, but, for me, this move began a project that is now going on its third year.

CW: You told me about finding and printing out that huge list of 1000+ words–what was it called again? Something along the lines of “words that will make you sound smart but not pretentious.” That’s still your source, right?

FV: Yes, this list is my source for the current word paintings. It is a list that is supposed to enable you to write with greater accuracy and not sound too wordy. I don’t think it is really important what the list is. It’s just there and I choose from it. I scan the list and grab words that look good at the moment. I do not consider the meaning or sound when doing this, in fact, I don’t even know many of the words but I do look them up in the dictionary for my own self betterment. My interest lies primarily in their shape, look and compositional capabilities. (The meaning is something I can’t truly control and my relationship to it is pretty much on the same level as the viewers’).

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Opening in 2009, the prolific exhibition DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture at the Tate Liverpool continues to examine the history of modern and contemporary sculpture. And the best part…the exhibit is open until April 1, 2012! This means you have no excuse to miss it. Do you need further convincing? Take a look back at DS coverage of Antony Gormley who is currently included in DLA Piper Series: This is Sculpture along with a few other artists you may have heard of, like Sir Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Arman, Yayoi Kusama and Cornelia Parker.

This article was originally published on July 21, 2010 by Seth Curcio:

On the north-west corner of Trafalger Square in London lies a structure simply coined the Fourth Plinth. Originally designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, the massive pedestal was intended to display an equestrian statue, but the sculpture was never finished due to a lack of funds. Since the late nineties, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts has commissioned several sculptural works for the Fourth Plinth including works from Marc Quinn to Rachel Whiteread. (more…)

Laney at 5th, Federal Building, 2011. Image on Endura transparency, unique photograph 33 1/2 x 28 1/4 inches. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery.

Every photographer has wished, at some point, that they could substitute the lens for their own eye. John Chiara does the next best thing: he crawls inside his homemade camera, the size of a small Uhual trailer, in order to make unique photographs. He may not be able to be the camera’s retina, but he can certainly inhabit its brain. The results are monumentally large (Chiara develops the prints in a large sewage pipe), and the intuitive process unpredictable and time-consuming. Chiara’s anachronistic imaging system maps the landscape in front of him, laying bare photography’s own inner workings in doing so.

For Fort at Lime Point,  John Chiara’s second solo exhibition in New York City at Von Lintel Gallery,  the San Francisco based photographer has crafted some of his most subtle and uneasy work to date. Chiara has long chartered the sublimity of nature and its sometimes uneasy cohabitation with the structures upon its surface; this body of work, however, is anchored to a site of specific historical gravity.

Funston at Cascade, 2011. Image on Ilfochrome paper, unique photograph 33 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches. Courtesy of Von Lintel Gallery.

Fort Lime Point is a little known military base, established on the San Francisco Bay during the Civil War. However, due to a lengthy litigation, the military was unable to begin excavating the site until a year after the war was over, in 1866. They did so by leveling the found with 24,000 pounds of gunpowder, attempting the level a base at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Rubble still exists there, left over from the blast over a century ago. The site is a reminder not only of extreme intervention with natural resources, but a failed attempt at creating a military defense base. It is a telling choice of location, and one that reflects back nicely on Chiara’s medium and process; this site, like the haunting photographs that depict it (and neighboring areas) in this show, is a waking memory of its own flawed history. And like the images, the place decays and morphs in front of our eyes. (more…)

At a talk at the Frieze Art Fair in London in October artists Broomberg and Chanarin and Taryn Simon talked about the relationship between photojournalism and art photography. In the Q&A that followed, someone in the audience asked why there were no strictly-photography galleries at the fair. The question seemed both unanswerable and, to a large extent, irrelevant. Though the talk itself circled an issue about photographic practices, the ‘is photography art’ debate is emphatically over, and in the glittering hubbub of Frieze, medium specificity of any sort was a rare find in the bounds of the white walled-booths.

photo: Sara Knelman

The uniformity of medium at Paris Photo a few weeks later made for, by comparison, a serene environment, light and airy without the weight and clutter of sculpture, quiet in comparison to all the sparkly attention-demanding work that dominated Frieze, and cloaked by the elegantly soaring ceilings of the Grand Palais, where over a hundred photography galleries from around the world set up shop for a few days in November. Even still, the volume of work was overwhelming, and presented the same challenge of how to extract and engage with individual works amidst the disorienting repetition of aisles of white cubes.

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Machine Torture, 1975. After the narration of 'In the Penal Colony' (1914) by Franz Kafka, realized for the exhibition 'Machines Celibataires' (1975-1977). Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij.

‘Oh’, she said. I looked down and saw the lady. She looked confused. ‘I thought those legs were part of the artwork, but they’re yours’. The legs in question were mine. They were stood on a ladder while the upper half of my body had disappeared into the attic. It had been watching a fairly horrendous film in which two men were making something unidentifiable out of what looked most like milk and porridge oats, all whilst producing numerous unnecessary movements and noises. It wasn’t my favourite artwork in the show, and before more visitors would start to confuse my legs for an artwork, I decided to climb down.

The show, titled He disappeared into complete silence, is constructed around a single work by one of the most prolific artists of the 20^th century, Louise Bourgeois. The centrepiece is a small portfolio, consisting of nine plates, each with an engraving and an accompanying parable. Every plate tells a story about an emotion or experience – the work covers loneliness, abandonment, distress, loss and even murder. Not the most frivolous of subjects, but then again, it is Louise Bourgeois, she who spent most of her career exploring the affair her father had with her nanny and the long-lasting effect this had on her psyche. Not someone to cling on to the more positive and superficial things in life, and rightly so. The important processes take place below the surface.

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