SANTA FE, NM.- SITE SANTA FE recently opened Goodnight Moon, a new solo exhibition by Rachel Rose on view since June 2 through September 11, 2023, and featuring new and recent sculpture and installation, as well as newly commissioned video work and notable historical loans from Yale Center for British Arts.
Rachel Rose has emerged over the past decade as one of the foremost artists in her generation, whose film work draws from and contributes to a long history of cinematic innovation. Whether investigating topics such as cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walkthrough painting, sculpture, drawing, or film, Rose creates poignant portraits of the past that connect deeply to what we feel in the present, illuminating emotional through-lines between then and now. The varied and nuanced pieces point to the history of painting as much as they do to the artifacts, sites, and debris in the history of capitalism.
Goodnight Moon centers Rose’s 2019 film, Enclosure, originally co-commissioned by LUMA Foundation and Park Avenue Armory. The film teeters on the edge of magical realism in its gripping and rigorously researched narrative about the catastrophic social, psychological, and ecological impact of the advent of capitalism in 17th-century agrarian England.
Alongside the film and sculptures are a collection of historic drawings and paintings on loan from the Yale Center of British Art by Samuel Palmer, John Linnell, and William Blake. These works directly inspired Rose’s vision for this expansive body of work.
“Rose’s earliest artistic training was in painting, and while she is perhaps best known for her film installations, the history of painting, including theories of composition and color, has always been central to her work.” says SITE SANTA FE curator Brandee Caoba.
Complementing the film are several sculptures called Loops, which combine rock and glass into artifacts that seem to hail from the landscape of another time. Though the rock and glass may initially appear as two distinct entities, Loops illustrate two states of the same material: sand. However, where sand heated for blown glass sets almost instantly, rock takes thousands of years to form.
The sensation of compressing all time into a single artwork reappears in Rose's The Last Day, 2023, a five-minute film that will premiere at SITE SANTA FE. Composed of 1,800 medium-format photographs of her children’s bedroom, the work depicts seven days, each representing an epoch in world history. Starting before life and culminating with the end of time, a carpet woven of nano lights co-created with Google and installed in the bedroom creates a sense of non-place, non-time, nowhere-ness.
Also shown for the first time at SITE SANTA FE will be Rose’s new series of photographs entitled Groundhog Day. Inspired by the eponymous 1993 comedy about endlessly living the same day, Rose’s collection of 24 photos documents every hour of her waking day on Groundhog Day, February 2, 2023. The installation Groundhog Day mirrors the final day imaged within The Last Day, with the illuminated carpet referenced in the white floor and floating scrim ceiling.
