Rachel Rose: Digital Alchemy
For more than a decade, New York-based artist Rachel Rose’s hallucinatory films have inspired an overtly embodied reaction in her audience. Emma O’Neill talks to the artist about her work, which draws on everything from art history to space exploration and early capitalist structures.
Image credit: Rachel Rose, Colore (1779), 2022, iridescence and color pigment, metallic powders, color photograph of Joseph Wright Of Derby, Virgil's Tomb by Moonlight, with Silius Italicus, ca. 1779, 128.1 x 154 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
For Rachel Rose, doubt is a generative force. “I always have profound doubts about making art. I wish I didn’t, and I envy friends that don’t,” she tells me. Since threatening to abandon art completely during her MFA in 2012, Rose says that doubt emboldened her to turn from abstract painting to the plurality of digital mediums. This sustained uncertainty has also created a practice that, a decade later, is still driven by the pursuit of discovery instead of mastery. “The crisis never really ended, for me,” says Rose. “[Now] rather than think of my doubt as an unruly shadow self that I carry on my back, I use it to try new things with greater confidence. If I’m going to be here doing this, I might as well accept the humility of making art in the larger world context and do the best I can.”
Doubt is also an inescapable part of contemplating the expansive subject matter of Rose’s work: being, consciousness, infinity, time, death. Through immersive installations of sound, video, installation, painting and sculpture, the artist investigates potentially sentimental themes to achieve an emotional register that eschews portentousness. The soundtrack of her 2015 breakout work Everything and More, for example, includes the wordless vocals of Aretha Franklin, electronic dance music and the astronaut David Wolf recounting his 1997 visit to space. In his interview with Rose, Wolf describes the infinite darkness of space and the perceptual reality of returning to Earth: the immense weight of a wristwatch, the obscenity of smells he had become accustomed to living without. ...Subscribe to read this article in full
