Rachel Rose: Lake Valley

About

The film opens on a sprawling suburb circling a lone patch of verdant wildness. From this lush and dreamlike park we are brought inside a family’s home just as its residents are stirring. The day is beginning, and father and daughter leave to pursue their daily activities while a pet is left behind, alone in the house. Night suddenly returns and the animal, seeking companionship, wanders away into the nearby primordial forest.

Each frame of the video is an amalgam of imagery cut and collaged out of industrial age children’s book illustrations and layered over with cel animation. The video’s surfaces hint at their own past lives: boiling pasta is also hair, an eggshell is also cobblestones. Within its suburban setting, the ordinariness of the pet’s activities belies the sense of alienation spawned by its environment. As the creature reaches for connection, its loneliness is compounded by the simultaneously familiar and alien nature of its surroundings.

The exhibition will be on view only at night, from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM, Tuesday through Saturday. In addition to the presentation at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Lake Valley is currently on view as part of the 57th Venice Biennale, through November 26. 

Rachel Rose (b.1986) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: Kunsthaus Bregenz (2017); Aspen Art Museum (2016); Serralves Museum, Porto (2016); Everything and More, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Palisades, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2015); Interiors, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015). Forthcoming solo exhibitions will be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto in Turin.