Rachel Rose | A Blunt and a New Familiarity

Rachel Rose. “Enclosure” (2019). Video still. © Rachel Rose. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. 

Rachel Rose has won numerous awards and continues to spellbind the art world with her cinematic innovation. Rose was raised on a farm in upstate New York, in a town called North Salem—not to be confused by the inimitable Salem, Massachusetts, known for the Witch Trials of 1692.

Yet something about Rose being raised in a namesake that is known for witchery feels right, keen, and cosmically in tune with her work. Spellbinding. Somehow, maybe with great humility and truth born out of the simplicity of farm life—grass, water, sunlight, various creatures—she continues to provide us with work that is equal parts available to the passive observer’s soul, yet layered and texturized enough to spark conversations in the great forums of artistic discourse.

Rachel Rose is educated deeply. Deep in the woods and deep in the libraries of Columbia and Yale University. Her work has continuously questioned and pondered answers to every facet of the human condition. Presently, she will have her New York premiere of Enclosure at Gladstone Gallery, followed by next month’s exhibition at Pilar Corrias. Enclosure (2019) meanders through a town long forgotten, but familiar to her North Eastern roots, and follows an agrarian community disrupted by looming industrialization. Heavily researched and layered with a nostalgic poignancy, the film will also be shown alongside Rose’s Colores works, a series of paintings inspired by the landscapes of Enclosure. We sat down for a conversation to gain insight into her inner values and imaginings, past, present, and future.

Rachel Rose. “Enclosure” (2019). Video still. © Rachel Rose. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. 

Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future? Or neither? Is that not the language you live in?

One of the things I think about the future and the past is that we are always living in both in our present. That’s one of the reasons I’m often returning to imaginations of the past in my work, because it’s a way to look at the roots within the structures of our present. But also there are all kinds of things that we imagine as futuristic existing in our present; anything as sci-fi as going to Mars, or as micro as doing surgery on the heart by going through arteries in the groin. It is hard to say what the tone of the present is in relation to the future, and in relation to the past. Rather, it feels like we are living in a mass organism of both at the same time. I wonder myself if every era felt that way, and I think to a certain extent it probably did, though, at times, maybe the future wasn’t formed as literal explorations through space-time, but maybe the future formed through spiritual ideas of magic and transformations of material and space-time through alchemy and animism and so forth.

What informs you more in your work would you say: the future landscape of humanity or the past landscape of humanity?

One of the things that I find every time I go to the past is how futuristic some aspects of different world views were. For example, in Enclosure, which is set in 17th century Agrarian England, one of the main characters is an alchemist, and he practices a kind of transformation of materials... and an idea, for example, that was prevalent at the time was animal-human soul transference. For example, if someone was sick, they might bring a sheep next to the body, and undergo a healing practice where the soul was transferred into the sheep’s body, and then kill the sheep, so that the sheep takes on almost like a casket of the illness, and then transfer the soul back into the human body. This is incredibly chimeric and futuristic, particularly if you think contemporarily where people are using pig organs within their own bodies, or the many ways that we use animals for our own advancement now, not just agriculturally or in terms of farming, but literally inside our bodies. This kind of animal transference of the soul, which was happening then and seems so crude
and also mystical, may also have futuristic implications. So, I often find that in looking at the past I find a future. It opens up possibilities for the future a bit more than looking through the present for me. There is more nourishment there.

Rachel Rose. “Enclosure” (2019). Video still. © Rachel Rose. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. 

Has your upbringing informed your current work?

To a certain extent, yes. I grew up on a farm surrounded by animals and quite isolated. Dirt roads. Open fields. Not too many friends around, and definitely nothing really to do. So most of my time was spent roaming around the landscape as a kid, making up imaginary worlds, and talking to animals. I feel that from this somewhat idyllic relationship to nature as a child it’s very much embodied in me the aliveness of nature. I think that it is in my work, in so far as part of my work is looking at this magical and perceptual experience that nature allows for, which I feel is something I was given space to have when I was a kid.

I don’t know how familiar you are with Terence McKenna, but he was continuously promoting this theory or feeling of the Archaic Revival, which is where technology as we know it, say, digital technology, has reached an apex. And he was very interested in ritualistic medicines, psychedelics, shamanic work... in essence, we have reached a point where we need to go back to our roots of how we lived, say, pre-industrialization, in order to get grounded again in a world that has become so digitized and fast. I bring this up because of what you have been saying about nature and alchemy and such.

I completely agree, and I think that there is a way to approach that in a non-regressive way. One of the things I was thinking about in Enclosure, the exhibition at Gladstone, is that the paintings that were being produced at the time of mass industrialization—like from Gainsborough, Palmer, Turner, Constable, or Joseph Wright of Derby—these are idyllic, pastoral perspectives on the landscape with this strong and emotional atmosphere. Romanticism is taking hold. Yet this is not what the landscape was like. This is a landscape that was being pillaged and burned and cut up and destroyed for industrial agricultural purposes. Yet what we see in the work that is being produced at the time has this longing and nostalgia and also a repression of the truth. And I think that sometimes our perspective on nature as this idyllic place—that if we could only retreat and only absorb it, everything would be better—is an escape and not necessarily truthful to where we are now. And I always think about this story of the tsunami in Thailand—days before it happened there were animals like elephants and dogs seen leaving the beach and running to the mountains. This is because they were in tune with their environment and had a literal sense and feeling—because of this tune—to what was coming and were, therefore, able to change and react accordingly. I think there is something to be said, not about a regressive return to the woods, cabin, Thoreau perspective, but maybe a perspective to really experience what we are experiencing today and become familiar with what is there. I think that action is essential to change and respond to the crisis we are in.

Rachel Rose. “Enclosure” (2019). Video still. © Rachel Rose. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. 

How do you feel about dreams? Do they influence you?

I love that you asked that question—no one has ever asked me that. One of the goals in my work is to create a kind of dream state when you are watching a film or looking at a sculpture. I think being in a dream that you can share with other people is a good thing, basically. I think about my own dreams a lot. I’m quite interested in being self-reflective or accessing through my dreams. And I notice periods of my life where I can’t remember my dreams at all and periods where I feel like I’m living with my dreams alongside me. I’m definitely in a period now where almost every night, I’m waking up remembering my dreams and they are staying with me throughout the day.

Are you more compelled to be in a city environment or a rural environment?

I think the city. I value the exchanges that happen in the city, and the serendipity and kismet type things, and the way in which the city can feel kinetic, which is an energy that the country just doesn’t offer.

Rachel Rose. “Enclosure” (2019). Video still. © Rachel Rose. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. 

Rachel Rose. “Enclosure” (2019). Video still. © Rachel Rose. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. 

How do you feel about your work being self-explanatory as opposed to being required to explain it in words?

I really believe in accessibility in art. I’m not for a kind of elitism that sometimes emerges and sometimes doesn’t, where the work doesn’t speak for itself and requires a background story. I feel you often see this in institutional critique in the 60s and conceptual sculpture in that time period as well, where the story is just as important as the object. I really try to make work where the story is there, and available, but hopefully it is as strikingly clear as it can be on its own—the way that watching a movie is like that or entering a building and experiencing the architects choices is like that. I love the accessibility of traditional narrative feature stories— and what a building within its structure offers.

Rachel Rose. “Enclosure” (2019). Video still. © Rachel Rose. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.