Interview: Rachel Rose On New Work & The Therapeutic Benefits Of Video

New York-based artist Rachel Rose, who in recent years has had solo exhibitions at Lafayette Anticipations, the Serpentine Gallery, the Whitney Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other institutions, draws from and contributes to a long history of cinematic innovation. Through her subjects, whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, or the sensory experience of walking in outer space, she questions what it is that makes us human and the ways we seek to alter and escape that definition. Open now and running until 14 April 2022, Rose presents her latest video work, Enclosure, at Pilar Corrias’ Eastcastle Street space. The fascinating film unfolds against the social and political backdrop of the Enclosure movement in England. Elsewhere, at the gallery’s Savile Row site, Rose shows Loops, a new series of sculptures, as well as a new set of paintings, titled Colores. To learn more about the artist and her ambitious new exhibition, Something Curated spoke with Rose.

Something Curated: Can you give us some insight into your background and journey to art-making?

Rachel Rose: I’ve always made art, since as early as I can remember. For a long time, I resisted the idea of becoming an artist, while simultaneously developing into one. During my first semester of college I was lucky enough to take Robert Reed’s drawing class. His methodology was rooted in an expansion and compression of time, as well as in repetition. We would be given assignments to make 100 drawings in an hour, or a thousand drawings in a day, or a single drawing in a month. From studying with Reed, I developed an understanding of the gravity of the edge.

Now, when I am composing a shot or cutting an edit, I always think about how the image is living as a rectangle or square, and how the proximity of one colour to the next changes the gravity of the composition. These are some fundamentals that I was taught in studying with Robert. I began making videos in grad school during a time when I lost all belief in painting. Art felt unimportant, like it could affect nothing. I became existentially obsessed with making something that could translate how I felt — which, at the time, was depressed. Video was a way to learn from the world outside of myself in order to go into myself. It’s a way to shape a feeling in time, through a story and through the sensual succession of images.

SC: How did the video work Enclosure come about?

RR: Originally co-commissioned by LUMA Arles and the Park Avenue Armory, Enclosure started from my interest in the social and political effects of the Enclosure movement — the large-scale privatisation of common land that transitioned England from a feudalist to a capitalist society, from an unpolluted landscape to a dramatically industrialised one in the 17th century. I wrote a story based on the history, it follows an imagined cult-like clan of land grifters, called the Famlee, led by Jaccko, a hustler who swindles people into selling him deeds to their land.

Recent, a teenage member of The Famlee, is essential to Jaccko’s hustle, and the film unfolds on Recent and Jaccko’s last predation, while above them looms a mysterious black orb, its inky aura drawing attention to the sky; it’s other-worldly presence is forebodingly cosmic. The film was a way for me to think about how the natural world was perceived at the time, and allude to the scale of dire, industrial changes soon to come.

SC: You utilise a very particular palette in your paintings — how do you think about using colour?

RR: I painted the Colores on photographs of 17th and 18th C. paintings — from Samuel Palmer to Gainsbourough. I mixed the paint to match the exact hues within the paintings, so it would feel as though they were extracted from the originals. The weights of the pigments, the mediums, and when each is added, the gravity and orientation of the photograph, all influence how these extracted colours then meet each photograph. I wanted the colour to bring the two times together — my present and the 18th century landscape, together.

SC: What attracts you to working with silica and could you expand on your interest in the material’s diverse states?

RR: The thing about silica is that it’s a material that can take two forms that seem widely different from one another — glass and rock are both composed of silica. The Loop sculptures are simply silica in two different states. Rocks form over millions of years. Rock pulverised becomes sand. Sand heated and blown sets instantaneously and becomes glass. Together, blown glass and rock meet to produce this unnatural superimposition of time.

SC: What is the thinking behind the selection of works included in your upcoming presentation at Pilar Corrias?

RR: The show includes Enclosure the film, the Colores paintings, the Loop sculptures and these photographs I took when I was seven years old in the area where I grew up. In them, the moon rises above a nearby hill, exposing a single intact dandelion. This moonlit landscape is reminiscent of the 18th century paintings I used and worked over in the Colores, and of the landscape of Enclosure, where the sky and the moon frame and dramatise the dramas of everyday human life in the land. So the works travel back and forward in time through a landscape.

SC: What are you currently reading?

RR: A script, a months old copy of The New York Review of Books that I drag everywhere, a 50 page market report on DeFi that I printed out to hypnotise myself into reading it, and a copy of Martha Stewart Living I bought at the airport.



Feature image: Rachel Rose, Enclosure, Pilar Corrias Eastcastle Street and Pilar Corrias Savile Row, 8 March – 14 April 2022. Photography: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London