Rachel Rossin

Signal is proud to present Peak Performance, an exhibition of new sculpture and painting by Rachel Rossin. Following her previous work in virtual reality environments, Rossin’s second exhibition at the gallery explores the disembodied consciousness in digital space: the seductive fantasy of a body freed from the limitations of anatomy and physics, the potential for abuse or disfigurement, and the inevitability of entropic deterioration.

Peak Performance presents three new bodies of work by the artist: oil paintings depicting virtual environments, melted plexiglass sculpture, and aquarium-like augmented reality computers suspended in oil. These works share a similar origin in Rossin’s survey of virtual spaces with and without physicality, and draw from her own experiences escaping and augmenting subjectivity through a merger with technology.

Rossin’s practice originates in sculpting virtual environments as body awareness exercises, and then enlivening them with light, motion, and physics. Traversing these landscapes with a virtual self, her perspectives ultimately become plein-air paintings in oil: fragments of imaginary topographies populated with fragmented bodies.

Selections from the same images are UV-printed onto a clear acrylic substrate, stretching the environments, figures, and textures onto translucent and mutable planes. These acrylic sheets are melted with a blowtorch and shaped by the artist’s body, molding the surface around her physical form. The resulting contorted planes are shot through with light, becoming lenses that distort and cast shadows from the source imagery.

The final works of Peak Performance are self-contained and biome-like aquarium machines – disassembled computers whose component parts are suspended in bubbling mineral oil. The non-conductive oil cools and lubricates the hardware, preserving the machinery for indefinite life inside its closed ecosystem. Closed-circuit cameras peer out from inside the aquariums, and their views are reproduced on digital displays that embed the viewer within the virtual worlds of Rossin’s design.

Rachel Rossin (1987) is a multimedia artist who works in painting, installation, and programming. She is regarded as one of the pioneers of the artistic medium of virtual reality. Rossin’s work has been exhibited internationally: recent solo and group exhibitions include My Little Green World, at Art In General, Latvia; ARS17 at Kiasma Contemporary Museum of Art in Helsinki, Finland; After Us at K11 Museum, Shanghai; The Unframed World at HeK, Basel; "First Look: Artists' VR" commission with Rhizome and The New Museum, New York; Alt-Facts at Postmasters, New York; Lossy at ZieherSmith, New York. In 2015 she was the recipient of the Fellowship in Virtual Reality at New Museum's Incubator New Inc. Rossin’s work has reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, W Magazine, Forbes, and others.