Rachel Rose is an American visual artist known for her video installations that merge moving images and sound within nuanced environments connecting them to broader subjects—whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, or the sensory experience of walking in outer space. Rose has presented solo exhibits at the Serpentine Galleries and the Whitney Museum of Art. Rose has presented solo exhibits at Fondazione Sandretto, Turin, Italy ; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia ; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz ; Museu Serralves, Porto ; The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen ; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London. Among her recent projects are Enclosure, jointly commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory in New York and LUMA Foundation in Arles, Wil-o-Wisp, jointly commissioned and owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Everything and More, presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Palisades, at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London in 2014. Rose is the recipient of the 2015 Frieze Artist Award. In addition to these and other solo exhibitions, the artist's work has been featured in the 2018 Carnegie International, the 2017 Venice Biennale, the 2016 São Paulo Biennial, and numerous other group exhibitions.
Early life and education
Rose is the daughter of Diana and Jonathan F. P. Rose. Her father is an urban planner with a focus on sustainable housing, Her uncle is the architect Peter Calthorpe. She started her education by earning a B.A. in humanities and B.A. art from Yale University and a M.F.A. from Columbia University. She entered graduate school as a painter, and quickly shifted, she studied under Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Work
Rose produces video installations juxtaposing images and sounds. Her experiential pieces work to convey sensorial aspects of ideas by manipulating sound and image. Her imagery depicts "humanity's shard current anxieties and their multi-layered interconnectivity" as well as humanities' relationship to the natural world, advancing technology, mortality, and history. Sitting Feeding Sleeping, which she filmed at a cryogenics lab in Arizona zoological parks, and a robotics perception lab, debuted at the Taipei Biennial. Palisades in Palisades focuses on the human relationship with history and the natural world and was shot in Palisades Interstate Park in New Jersey, site of the Battle of Fort Lee during the American Revolutionary War. A Minute Ago features found video footage of Philip Johnson conducting a tour of his Glass House and of a 2014 hail storm in Novosibirsk, Siberia. In October 2015, Rose presented Everything and More, a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Everything and More was inspired by David Wolf's experience of a space walk. The film was partially shot in a neutral buoyancy pool at the University of Maryland. Rose filmed at the University of Maryland's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, plunging a camera into the lab's watery depths. She achieved the film's abstract, vaguely extraterrestrial shots by filming in her kitchen materials with an air compressor on liquids such as milk, oil, water, and ink. Rose projected the video on a semi-transparent screen and covered the windows of the gallery's black box with opaque scrim to achieve an out-of-body feel. Instead of blacking out the room's floor-to-ceiling windows, Rose has covered them with a translucent scrim, dimming but not fully obscuring the view of the rooftop behind it, full of sculptures from the current Frank Stella retrospective. Lake Valley debuted at Pilar Corrias gallery in London was a collaboration with a cel animator, and utilized images from the 19th-century illustrations she had archived. Each frame is a composite of elements from 19th-20th century children's book illustrations cut, layered, and re-mapped for the present-day. Wil-o-Wisp draws from historical accounts of 17th century agrarian England, the story follows Elspeth Blake, a mystic and healer, across three decades. The Philadelphia Museum of Art featured Rose's Wil-o-Wisp in May 2018. Enclosure is presented on an originally developed holographic screen format and is a heist story about survival in the seventeenth-century agrarian English landscape. In July 2019, Rose will present Enclosure, a solo show at Luma Arles in Arles, France. The Park Avenue Armory will feature Rose's Enclosure in 2020. Whitney curator Christopher Y. Lew noted "how she was able to gather such a mix of images, and of content as well, and weave it into a unique narrative. She pulled some kind of order out of our whirlpool of information, without ever denying the flood."
Rose won the illy Present Future Prize at Artissima 2014 and the Frieze Artist Award for site-specific installations by emerging artists at the London fair.
