Freeze Frame

American Video Artist Rachel Rose On A Liberating Commission

Taking in video, performance and sound, often all at once, time-based media can be thrillingly engaging or beyond testing. The young New York-based artist Rachel Rose – who layers animation, sound, original footage and found material in her video compositions – thrills and engages. At 32, her achievements already include solo exhibitions at the Whitney in New York and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, as well as memorable appearances at Frieze Art Fair (she won the Frieze Artist Award in 2015) and the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

It’s a stratospheric ascent for Rose, who abandoned painting, her original medium of choice, while studying for an MFA at Columbia University. She found new inspiration in documentary filmmaking and moved at pace from there. ‘I felt that painting didn’t really offer me the tools to think about the questions that felt pertinent to me,’ Rose says. ‘In fact, I thought I didn’t want to be an artist, because I didn’t know how to think about what I wanted to think about through art. The process of learning how to shoot [video] and edit, and about sound, led me back to art. I wanted to touch the real world and touch different moments in time.’

Rose captures a variety of emotional and subliminal states in each of her video pieces. Perception becomes distorted, reality twists and your awareness and understanding of what is observed shifts. In Lake Valley, 2016, an animated work that was first shown at the Central Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, Rose uses the figure of a pet to explore the shift from childhood to adulthood. Set in a familiar suburban landscape, the piece is made up of thousands of images extracted from different children’s storybooks that Rose then cut up and collaged into layers on a cel animation plate.