Rachel Rossin: Boohoo Stamina

About

Magenta Plains is pleased to present a series of new gestural paintings and combine paintings by Rachel Rossin, a New York-based multimedia artist and self taught programmer. Rossin is considered a pioneer of Virtual Reality art who synthesizes traditional art-making techniques such as painting and sculpture with new technology, examining the boundaries between the hyper-real and imaginary. Boohoo Stamina considers the psychological mechanisms of processing loss and self-repair through the lens of technology. By merging painting with novel technologies such as holographic displays, VR, and AI, the exhibition asks: in the constellation of emotional stamina, does technology act more like a scaffold, splint, or graft? 

Rossin’s gestural paintings are based on renderings and environments she creates digitally, and vice versa. Her surreal canvases meld distorted, just-recognizable fragments of landscapes and still lifes with vivid splashes and smears. Through her combine paintings Rossin explores the inherent disembodiment of VR and the emotional memory of a body, utilizing imagery of mechanical supports such as chassis, military exoskeletons, and mech suits as braces or peripherals for the extension of the body and mind. Her fluency between the two very different realms of painting and VR installation begs the question: what do we lose in the process of turning reality into simulation, and simulation back into reality? 

In Boohoo Stamina, Rossin suspends digital holograms onto static paintings, drawing imagery from her own 3D digital asset archive which she has been developing since the age thirteen. The hologram paintings function as tone poems, intended to inspire viewers to imagine or consider scenes, images, specific ideas or moods, and encourage literary, pictorial and dramatic associations. Symbols and avatars used such as cats, harpies, and the caduceus staff of Hermes are continually iterated to create her own personal mythology. With the interjection of this ephemeral hologram element, Rossin enhances the plasticity of the painting through the viewer’s experience of the durational present moment. 

The framework for Boohoo Stamina was developed in response to the idea of sentinel species in ecology—to send a sentinel out is to provide advance warning of imminent collapse. Over the last year, Rossin has developed a simple AI network "sentinel" that acts as a creative and emotional support in forming virtual worlds for paintings, aiding her in developing new visual languages and mythologies for her own relief. As she continues to work at the forefront of new media, Rossin prioritizes experience over phenomenon, investigating the slippage between technology’s potentially infinite utopia and the impermanence of being human.

Rachel Rossin (b. 1987; Florida) has mounted recent solo exhibitions at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; 14a, Hamburg, Germany; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Signal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Tennis Elbow, The Journal Gallery, New York, NY; and Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia. Her work has been included in group exhibitions and projects at the Louvre Museum Auditorium, Paris, FR; Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; K11 Museum of Art, Shanghai, China; Kiasma Contemporary Museum of Art, Helsinki, Finland; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; and more. She has been a guest lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany; New Museum, New York, NY; and at MIT, Cambridge, MA. Her work is currently on view at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing in “World on a Wire,” the first exhibition in a new partnership between Hyundai Motor Company and Rhizome, the New Museum’s digital art affiliate, subsequently travelling to Hyundai Motorstudio Moscow and Hyundai Motorstudio Seoul.