A Minute Ago

2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

8 min 43

Rachel Rose

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A minute Ago starts with a hailstorm pelting down unexpectedly on a quiet beach in Siberia. People, half naked, run for cover under towels and parasols, to the music of the Pink Floyd. The next scene is an interview of Philip Johnson, filmed 10 years before in the Glass House he constructed. Johnson was 90 years old then. At this point in the video there is a kind of digital sound that interrupts the high definition image, moving to the rhythm of a wood percussion musical composition by Steve Reich. The house, surrounded by an extraordinary landscape, is then bombarded by hail, the soundtrack becomes a live concert interrupted by the yelling and cheering of the public. The painting Landscape with the funeral of Phocion by Poussin is the only image in the house. It shows a hearse going through fields to the burial place. The image duplicates itself with the deconstruction of the video image, the rain which pixelates the screen, the soundtrack which chops up this time space.

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Rachel Rose is a visual artist known for her video installations that merge moving images and sound within nuanced environments connecting them to broader subjects. Her work investigates subjects as diverse as cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, and the sensory experience of walking in outer space. For Rose, the current moment is one of shifting terrain: as technology advances, the world changes beneath and around us, leaving us struggling to keep up. Rose is interested in the rapidly changing conditions we live in, and the ways that language, technology, and images mediate the out-of-sync realities of organic life. Originally trained as a painter, Rose now works in several media, with film being her primary outlet. Her film works are remarkable for their fusion of images and sound, her dense filmic tapestries reflecting the deep, multivalent explorations that drive her.

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Colors:

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• vulnerability.n.01
• catastrophe.n.02
• hail.n.01
• ecology.n.01
• public.n.02
• glass.n.01
• american video artists
• american women installation artists