Rachel Rose | A Space Travel Into Mortality
“It felt as though someone who has gone to outer space and come back has experienced a brink of nothingness,” says the acclaimed American artist Rachel Rose. Watch Rose present her dreamlike video work ‘Everything and More’, which explores the concept of mortality through the “out-of-body experience” of an astronaut. “I would say each of my works are a way for me to think through mortality.” Rose is interested in the distinctions between life and death, and how it shapes us as well as the surrounding world. Her video work ‘Everything and More’ (2015) is inspired by the science fiction movies ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Gravity’ as well as American astronaut David Wolf’s experience of a spacewalk. Rose interviewed Wolf and shot the film partially in a neutral buoyancy pool at the University of Maryland, where astronauts learn to spacewalk in a giant pool of water. Other parts of the video were shot at her home, using everyday materials such as milk and olive oil, which were shot in close-up to create abstract images. These everyday materials, she continues, explicate Wolf’s journey in space: “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.” 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 and Whitney Museum of American art in New York City. In 2017 she was part of the Venice Biennale. She lives and works in New York City. Rachel Rose was interviewed by Mikkel Rosengaard at her studio in New York City in August 2018.
Photo by Aron Visuals
