Rachel Rossin

Magenta Plains is pleased to present SCRY, an installation and exhibition by Rachel Rossin including new paintings and transmedia objects. Building on her multimedia project The Maw Of, SCRY offers a new poetics and visual language for the next epoch in technology, offering a critical response on what painting is for and its enduring significance in our tech-dependent society. With the increasing existential threat/opportunity of artificial intelligence cresting over our collective horizon, Rossin postulates painting as a talisman of our inherent humanity and embodied consciousness.

SCRY is composed of three distinct bodies of work, each of which tackle different dimensions of our newly emerging era. Hanging from the ceiling of the gallery and bathing the entirety of the exhibition in otherworldly light, Rossin's lenticular LED screen The Maw Of continues her investigation into human autonomy and brain-machine integration research. Originally presented in digital and physical forms at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Maw Of situates the innate human desire to continually “remake” ourselves as central to the cultural inflection point represented by the advent of artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, Rossin’s paintings offer a critical rejoinder to the promise and peril proposed by The Maw Of. Flesh and machine are hybridized in these works, as figuration simultaneously blends into abstraction. These images draw from Rossin’s childhood drawings of biblical figures associated with the apocalypse, generating a performance of Rossin’s own conception of “the end times.” Furthermore for Rossin, painting represents a marking of time on the canvas, a recording of the movement of the artist’s body. Despite the depth of discourse on this particular facet of painting, the humanness it implies continues to emphasize the relevance of painting as a practice and is a reminder of what endures the “annihilation of analog” represented by our increasingly tech-dependent culture.

These paintings are in conversation with Rossin’s small Scry Glass screens, distributed throughout the space. These works incorporate elements of the animation central to The Maw Of, and in doing so activate the characters and texture of the paintings. As their title suggests, the Scry Glass screens evoke two modes of looking: a form of divination and fortune-telling as well as a form of reflection using a Claude glass, a revolutionary tool used by 18th century landscape painters. For Rossin however, these “black mirrors” are not for predicting end times, but instead leave clues for the viewer, allowing us to remain tethered to the present.

Rachel Rossin (b. 1987, West Palm Beach, FL) is an internationally renowned artist and programmer whose multi-disciplinary practice has established her as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality. Rossin’s work blends painting, sculpture, new media and more to create digital landscapes that address the impact of technology on human psychology, embodiment, sovereignty, and phenomenology.

The New York Times has stated “Ms. Rossin has achieved something, forging a connection between abstract painting and augmented perception that opens up a fourth dimension that existed only in theory for earlier painters.”

Rachel Rossin's works have been exhibited at prestigious institutions around the world; including the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Kiasma Museum of Helsinki, K11: Shanghai, The New Museum, Rhizome, The Hyundai Museum of Seoul, GAMeC of Bergamo Italy, HEK of Münchenstein Basel Switzerland, ‘Kim’ Museum of Riga Latvia, The Sundance Film Festival, The Carnegie Museum of Art and the Casino Museum of Luxembourg. In addition to her artistic practice, Rossin has also lectured at Stäedelschule, Google, MIT, Stanford, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been published in several notable publications, such as "Video/Art: The First Fifty Years" published by Phaidon, "Chimeras, Inventory of Synthetic Cognition" by the Onassis Foundation, and "Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century" by MIT Press.

Rossin's works are in the permanent collection of institutions such as Borusan Contemporary Museum of Art in Istanbul, The Zabludowicz Collection, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has been widely covered in the press, including National Geographic, The New York Times, The BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Wired Magazine, and many others.

Rossin was recently co-commissioned by the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to create an installation and digital artwork entitled "The Maw Of." This work is included in "Refigured," a group exhibition at the Whitney on view through July 3rd. Rossin lives and works in New York, NY.