2022 Catalogue Archive

A pioneer of Virtual Reality art, Rachel Rossin merges new technologies with classical approaches to art. Her recent gestural paintings are based on digital renderings and built VR environments, using mechanical imagery, recognizable landscapes, or blurred atmospheric spaces as the background. Here, the airbrushed plum and pink window frame with dappled sunlight and the silhouettes of tree branches serves as Rossin’s backdrop for thick paint gestures. These hand-painted brushstrokes activate the constructed worlds, challenging the viewer to move between what is real and what is fictive. “I’m trying to expand the vocabulary here for a lived experience that’s difficult to describe visually,” she said. Rossin is a self-taught programmer and multimedia artist living in New York. Her work has been included in national and international exhibitions.