Rachel Rossin: works from THE MAW OF. September 7 – October 14, 2023

Rachel Rossin: works from THE MAW OF, September 7 – October 14, 2023

Emerson Contemporary, Emerson College’s platform for visual art, proudly presents Rachel Rossin: works from THE MAW OF, a solo exhibition featuring recent works initially commissioned by KW Institute of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art by the New York-based painter and digital artist Rachel Rossin. On view in the Media Art Gallery at 25 Avery Street, September 7 – October 15, 2023. Free and open to the public, Tuesday – Saturday from 12-6pm.  

Works from The Maw Of explores the coming together of flesh, machine, cognition, and code sparked by current research into brain-computer interfaces. Rossin’s work blends painting, sculpture, new media, and more to create digital landscapes, which she uses to address aspects of disorder, embodiment, the all-presence of technology, and its effect on human psychology.

The exhibition features a site-specific immersive installation, innovative new video works and recent paintings. Conceived as mixed-reality theater, Rossin’s ongoing project addresses the expanded limits of technology and the human body. The artist 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.

Floating LED ‘portals’ continue Rossin’s investigation into human autonomy and brain-machine integration research. Originally presented 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.  

Rossin’s small Scry Glass video sculptures incorporate animation central to The Maw Of, and activate the characters and texture of the paintings. The Scry Glasses 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 the artist 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. 

The artist’s recent paintings offer a visual counterpoint to the digital world proposed by The Maw Of. These images draw from the artist’s childhood drawings of biblical figures associated with the apocalypse, representing Rossin’s conception of “the end times.” For Rossin painting represents a marking of time on the canvas, a recording of the movement of the artist’s body. They continue to emphasize the relevance of painting as a practice and are a reminder of what endures the “annihilation of analog” represented by our increasingly tech-dependent culture.