VIDEO:Rachel Rose-Between Living and Non-Living

Meet the New York-based video artist Rachel Rose, who creates visually poetic and multi-layered narratives, exploring different “scales of mortality”: “I try to use myself a bit like a tiny sensor, and then quickly move outside myself to the place that it spots,” she says. In the video, Rose talks about her video works ‘A Minute Ago’ (2014), ‘Palisades in Palisades’ (2014), ‘Everything and More’ (2015) and ‘Lake Valley’ (2016).

Rose believes that all of her video works stem from a question or a feeling, such as fear or unease: “Trying to understand that feeling and connect it to places and time outside myself, to deepen its spectrum of what it is.” In this way, her animated work ‘Lake Valley’ (2016) began with the feeling of responsibility that came with adulthood. The onset of adulthood had triggered Rose’s curiosity in childhood, and the work explores some of its central themes. Another common thread in her videos, Rose continues, is that they are “a way for her to think through “distinctions between life and death, living and non-living, and how that’s shaping both us and the world around us.” In ‘Everything and More’ this is done through American astronaut David Wolf’s experience of a spacewalk: “I was thinking about David Wolf’s story in relation to mortality – that in outer space we’re faced with nothing, and when we die or maybe we’re about to die, maybe we’re also thinking about nothing.”

The young artist always considers the space in which her video installations are shown: “I try to think about emotional aspects of the work that can be paired with formal constraints of the room where it is, and find a way for them to meet.” She hopes that the ways in which they meet are not performative but “come from the inherent construction of what it is to see a video in a space.” Moreover, she finds that it is essential for her to be unstable in the way she works, always thinking about what the work needs and how she can deliver that: “Not knowing how to make the thing I want to make is a significant component of making it.”

Rachel Rose (b. 1986) is an American artist known for her video installations that merge moving images and sound within nuanced environments, connecting them to broader but related subject matter. Rose has exhibited at prominent venues such as Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, and has held solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries in London, Whitney Museum of American art in New York City, Castello di Rivoli in Turin and Aspen Art Museum in Aspen. In 2017 she was part of the Venice Biennale. She lives and works in New York City.

Rachel Rose, Between Living and Non-Living, Interview by Mikkel Rosengaard, Camera: Pierce Jackson, Produced and edited by: Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen and Christian Lund, © Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2018, Supported by Nordea-fonden