STALKING THE TRACE, ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION, LONDON, UK
Working seamlessly across traditional art forms and new technologies, Rossin investigates the boundaries between, and changing perceptions of, the hyper-real and the imaginary. In My Little Green Leaf, Rossin presents a virtual reality work within a physical installation, using Oculus Rift headsets that cut out external stimuli and provide access to an experience of space that defies gravity. These devices—which have integrated headphones with 3D audio effect and rotational and positional tracking—also allow users to experience the work while sitting, standing, or walking around a room. Environments and ‘objects’ appear to disintegrate and reform, explode and implode, confusing our sense of space and what can be within one’s control.
This new VR piece presents an interactive simulation, populated by rebinding animation rigs that were initially intended for different geometries and 3D forms but that are now set into motion by artificial intelligence (AI). Alongside are sculptures and a vista that are essentially folded ‘substrates’ extruded from the virtual reality (VR) works. Here, the sculptures act more as three-dimensional paintings that the artist has molded entirely through the pressure of her body, while the vista emulates the idealized landscapes that are often created for desktop backgrounds / screensavers.
These virtual and physical components cannot be viewed at the same time, but the experience of switching in and out of, or between, such different modes of perception is at the heart of Rossin’s work. For Rossin, the contemporary experience of the world is not a binary one in terms of the relationship between these: much as her practice operates across physical and immaterial states, it rather exists along a gradient between them.
Peak Performance presents three new bodies of work by the Rachel Rossin: oil paintings depicting virtual environments, melted plexiglass sculpture, and aquarium-like augmented reality computers suspended in oil. These works share a similar origin in Rossin’s survey of virtual spaces with and without physicality, and draw from her own experiences escaping and augmenting subjectivity through a merger with technology.
Rossin’s practice originates in sculpting virtual environments as body awareness exercises, and then enlivening them with light, motion, and physics. Traversing these landscapes with a virtual self, her perspectives ultimately become plein-air paintings in oil: fragments of imaginary topographies populated with fragmented bodies.
Selections from the same images are UV-printed onto a clear acrylic substrate, stretching the environments, figures, and textures onto translucent and mutable planes. These acrylic sheets are melted with a blowtorch and shaped by the artist’s body, molding the surface around her physical form. The resulting contorted planes are shot through with light, becoming lenses that distort and cast shadows from the source imagery.
The final works of Peak Performance are self-contained and biome-like aquarium machines – disassembled computers whose component parts are suspended in bubbling mineral oil. The non-conductive oil cools and lubricates the hardware, preserving the machinery for inde nite life inside its closed ecosystem.
In Lossy, Rachel Rossin introduces her virtual reality experience alongside the oil paintings they inspire and are inspired by. Upheaving traditional notions of portraiture, landscape and still life, the paintings both inform and reflect the technological installation, an inversion of the most sacred of standards— age-old techniques with the flare of advance guard contemporaneity.
Rossin’s paintings, blurred, smeared, transmogrified environments caught in a state of permanent denouement, are hung alongside Oculus Rift headsets, where the viewer will experience a gravity defying 360 degree view of Rossin's world, including her apartment, her studio, and her paintings blown apart by the unlimited possibilities of the digital microcosm and her imagination.
Working seamlessly across traditional art forms and new technologies, Rossin investigates the boundaries between, and changing perceptions of, the hyper-real and the imaginary. In My Little Green Leaf, Rossin presents a virtual reality work within a physical installation, using Oculus Rift headsets that cut out external stimuli and provide access to an experience of space that defies gravity. These devices—which have integrated headphones with 3D audio effect and rotational and positional tracking—also allow users to experience the work while sitting, standing, or walking around a room. Environments and ‘objects’ appear to disintegrate and reform, explode and implode, confusing our sense of space and what can be within one’s control.
This new VR piece presents an interactive simulation, populated by rebinding animation rigs that were initially intended for different geometries and 3D forms but that are now set into motion by artificial intelligence (AI). Alongside are sculptures and a vista that are essentially folded ‘substrates’ extruded from the virtual reality (VR) works. Here, the sculptures act more as three-dimensional paintings that the artist has molded entirely through the pressure of her body, while the vista emulates the idealized landscapes that are often created for desktop backgrounds / screensavers.
These virtual and physical components cannot be viewed at the same time, but the experience of switching in and out of, or between, such different modes of perception is at the heart of Rossin’s work. For Rossin, the contemporary experience of the world is not a binary one in terms of the relationship between these: much as her practice operates across physical and immaterial states, it rather exists along a gradient between them.
Rachel Rossin, who lives and works in New York, is a multimedia artist and self-taught programmer who works in painting, installation and virtual reality. In her work she draws together traditional art-making techniques, such as painting, with new technologies such as virtual reality and hologram projections to examine the slippage between the real and the digital, between perceptual and embodied space. Greasy Light presents a new body of work by the artist in which she refers to the smeariness of the quality of paint and color in translating the space. Thick and fleshy paint is applied to the canvas with both an expressive and figurative gesture to highlight and describe the paint’s physical property. Pushing the medium’s boundaries, paint is annotated by hologram projections, a technology that is used for commercial signage and advertising. Suspended above the fleshy paintings, the recursive holographic annotations act as self-referential icons that express the virtual space that the paintings are made from. Fading the virtual and the real is further highlighted in the figurative elements of her paintings that are based on images of demons referencing daemons, a computer program that runs as a background process. By blending and twisting inherent meanings of real life scenarios, video games and stock computer images, Rachel Rossin creates a space and a narrative that is neither virtual or real but a fusion of the two. It gives the viewer a glimpse of how the digital fades more and more into our ‘real’ life raising the question of where reality lies.
Recursive Truth is a video work based on generative AI research, using video game mods and deep fakes to explore loss, memory, and truth as a medium. Bugs created inside the work expose the fragility of memory and ultimately either destroy the video game or function only as visual gags.
by Samantha Blackmon (Author), Andrew Williams (Author), Theresa Bembnister (Editor)
Millions of people play video games every day, including visual artists, yet they are rarely examined as a major influence on contemporary art, though they offer rich opportunities for creative expression. Published for an exhibition at Akron Art Museum, Open World presents a survey of artworks influenced by video games and gaming culture. Artworks include paintings, sculptures, textiles, prints, drawings, animation, video games, video game modifications and game-based performances and interventions by game maker–artists. Artists such as Tim Portlock, Angela Washko, Cory Arcangel, Feng Mengbo, Rachel Rossin and Bill Viola reference a cross-section of games in their artwork, ranging from early text adventure and arcade games to multi-player online roleplaying games. Many of their works are inspired by some of the most beloved and recognizable video game franchises, including Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, The Sims and Final Fantasy.
Zabludowicz Collection are proud to announce our new publication to coincide with the exhibition Rachel Rossin: Stalking the Trace, 21 March - 7 July 2019.
This publication comprises of an introduction by Programme Director, Maitreyi Maheshwari, a new essay by Mikkel Rosengaard and extracts from a number of texts that have informed Rossin's work - Arcadia by tom Stoppard, BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE: Six Exercises in Political Thought by Hannah Arendt, Entropy Made Visible by Robert Smithson, To those born after by Bertolt Brecht, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang and Altermodern by Nicholas Bourriaud. Each publication comes with a screen printed electrical bag.
Limited edition of 500
Printed by Cassochrome
Edited by Antonia Blocker
Designed by Burgess & Beech
