Rachel Rossin “Lossy”

Zieher Smith & Horton

poster for Rachel Rossin “Lossy”

This event has ended.

Often the false has a greater “reality” than the true. Therefore, it seems that all information, and that includes anything that is visible, has its entropic side. Falseness, as an ultimate, is inextricably a part of entropy, and this falseness is devoid of moral implications.
Robert Smithson “Entropy and The New Monuments”, 1966

In her first exhibition with the gallery, Rachel Rossin introduces her virtual reality experience alongside the oil paintings they inspire and are inspired by. Upheaving traditional notions of portraiture, landscape and still life, the paintings both inform and reflect the technological installation, an inversion of the most sacred of standards— age-old techniques with the flare of advance guard contemporaneity.

Rossin begins by making first “drafts” of the paintings, which are then brought into virtual reality where “worlds are set loose on themselves: gravity finds itself inverted and once strictly 2-d paintings are repurposed in cloth dynamics simulations…. The paintings are thus subjected to repurposing with the final result being work on canvas made from these virtual tableaus – manifesting what was previously digital into the physical – where I act as the entropic moderator” (interview with the artist).

In the parlance of information technology, the term lossy is used to define entropy in data encoding most commonly known in JPG and MP3 formats. In this context, the word is a metaphor for entropy being a fundamental law of our universe as per the 2nd law of thermodynamics. In short, loss is everywhere. Again in Rossin’s words:

“The exhibition posits that our relationship with reality isn’t comprised of a separate virtual and real but looks more like a gradient between the two— with most of our modern lives being lived in the action of hopping from screen to screen. Like lossy compression, this process includes entropy as an inherent given— in optimizing what already exists by omitting the excess in worlds with their own internal logic.”

The exhibition will feature both Rossin’s paintings, blurred, smeared, transmogrified environments caught in a state of permanent denouement, alongside an Oculus Rift headset, where the viewer will experience Rossin’s microcosmic digital worlds. The New York Times described another of the artist’s virtual reality installation’s at Brooklyn gallery Signal earlier this year as “immers[ing] yourself in a Dante-esque virtual reality.”

Rachel Rossin (b. 1987) lives and works in New York City. She has been both an artist and computer programmer since her childhood in West Palm Beach, Florida. She is currently a fellow at New Inc. in conjunction with the New Museum and was part the New Ideas Biennial in 2015 and 2013.

Media

Schedule

from October 15, 2015 to November 14, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-10-15 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Rachel Rossin

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