Rachel Rose (artist)

Rachel Rose (born 1986) is an American visual artist known for her video installations. Her work explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. She draws from, and contributes to, a long history of cinematic innovation, and through her subjects—whether investigating cryogenics, 17th century agrarian England, the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, or the sensory experience of walking in outer space—she questions what it is that makes us human and the ways we seek to alter and escape that designation.

Among her recent projects are Enclosure (2019), jointly commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory in New York and LUMA Foundation in Arles, Wil-o-Wisp (2018), jointly commissioned and owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Everything and More (2015), presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Palisades (2015), at the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2014. Rose is the recipient of the 2015 Frieze Artist Award.

Early life and education
Rose is the daughter of Diana (née Calthorpe) and Jonathan F. P. Rose. Her father is an urban planner with a focus on sustainable housing. Her uncle is the architect Peter Calthorpe. She started her education by earning a B.A. in humanities and B.A. art from Yale University and a M.F.A. from Columbia University. She entered graduate school as a painter, and quickly shifted, she studied under Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Work
Rose produces video installations juxtaposing images and sounds. Her experiential pieces work to convey sensorial aspects of ideas by manipulating sound and image. Her imagery depicts "humanity's shard current anxieties, and their multi-layered interconnectivity" as well as humanities' relationship to the natural world, advancing technology, mortality, and history.

Rose works primarily with moving pictures, and each video requires a long period of research. She culls disparate material as well as her own footage to investigate different topics and locations. These have included death, cryogenics, and zoos for Sitting Feeding Sleeping (2013); notions of time expressed through geology, and human history for Palisades in Palisades (2014); the legacy of Modernism and ecological devastation as encapsulated by Philip Johnson’s Glass House in A Minute Ago (2014); the concept of mortality through the “out-of-body experience” of an astronaut in Everything and More (2015); themes of abandonment and separation as a dominant narrative in early children’s stories in Lake Valley (2016); women’s shifting role within society and their relations to magic on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution in Wil o Wisp (2018); and the catastrophic psycho-social and ecological disturbances triggered by the advent of capitalism and industrialization in Enclosure (2019).

Exhibitions
Recent solo exhibitions include GL STRAND (2023); LUMA Arles (2023); SITE Santa Fe (2023); Gladstone Gallery Seoul (2023); Cc Strombeek (2022); Pond Society (2020); Lafayette Anticipations (2020); Fridericianum (2019); LUMA Foundation (2019); Fondazione Sandretto (2018); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2017); Museu Serralves (2016); The Aspen Art Museum (2016); The Whitney Museum of American Art (2016) and Serpentine Galleries (2015). In addition to these and other solo exhibitions, the artist's work has been featured in the 2018 Carnegie International, the 2017 Venice Biennale, the 2016 São Paulo Biennial, and numerous other group exhibitions.

Awards
Rose won the illy Present Future Prize at Artissima 2014 and the Frieze Artist Award for site-specific installations by emerging artists at the London fair.