Guest
A leading voice in contemporary video, New York-based artist and filmmaker Rachel Rose explores the unique experience of being human and our unsteady relationship to time and space, image and sound. Using cinematic innovations, she constructs rich, sensorial landscapes that challenge perception and the conventions of storytelling. Her hypnotic 2014 short A Minute Ago sinks into the difficulty of capturing a fleeting moment. The film opens with a YouTube video of a placid Siberian beach day, suddenly disrupted by a maelstrom of hail that flips the scene from idyllic to catastrophic in a rare single take. “It was perfect weather a minute ago,” the cameraman says over a downpitched version of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes,” which the band famously performed in 1971 to an empty amphitheater in the Pompeii ruins – “a post-catastrophe concert,” Rose noted. In a collapsing collage, the moment dissolves into modernist architect Philip Johnson’s famous Glass House in Connecticut. Building on footage she captures herself, Rose layers a range of art and pop culture touchstones, from Nicolas Poussin’s 17th century Baroque painting The Funeral of Phocion to Big Sean’s 2012 mid-concert breakdown.
