Pan - pan
Rachel Rossin
December 15, 2021 - January 3, 2022
Felt Smaller, 2021
Runtime 16:13
Embedded holographic display, animated zoetrope video, cloth-covered cord, acrylic airbrush and oil on canvas
68 x 60 in (172.7 x 152.4 cm)
COUNTY is pleased to present Pan-pan, a solo exhibition by Rachel Rossin featuring an installation of technologically-augmented paintings from the artist’s acclaimed Hologram-Combine series.
Rossin’s Hologram-Combines drop us into a hyper-color wonderland seemingly free of entropy, full of exhilarating movement and light—an imagined utopia of pure visual and kinetic pleasure. Flower petals cascade in front of painted tableaus of blurred sunset colors, saddled horses run on animated loops, hurricanes whir at their center, songbirds fall to the ground—all on an invisible holographic plane one inch above the surface of Rossin’s paintings. The artist materializes these illusions out of thin air by updating one of the oldest motion picture technologies, the zoetrope, using state-of-the-art virtual reality modeling and LED holograms.
The exhibition includes a sound installation that Rossin made in collaboration with the artist and musician Brendan Sullivan, featuring a lilting and evocative tone poem accompanied by orchestrated field recordings from the Florida Everglades and the musician himself.
The title of the exhibition, Pan-pan, refers to a distress call used in international radio-telecommunications aboard ships and aircraft. The word is derived from the French word “panne”, meaning “breakdown” or “failure” and is used to request for urgent help, acting as a precursor to a mayday, and where the situation is not immediately life-threatening - e.g. “Help, please” rather than “please help!”
As in Rossin’s earlier Lossy pieces, which embraced the accidental beauty created by digital image compression, her new series of Hologram-Combine paintings explore the interplay between real and virtual worlds - working in how “panne” (“failure”) in digital imaging technologies can have an organic beauty of their own. By clipping from a personal virtual reality and visual lexicon Rossin has been developing since she was 8 years old, she brings these spaces to life representing her own metabolic process between the virtual and the real. Rossin’s work in Pan-pan, reflects an ever-growing technological present to us - asking how to better connect to reality-at-large and each other - especially with the murmurs of breakdowns and danger just out of sight.
Rachel Rossin is an artist who lives and works in New York, NY. She was the first fellow in Virtual Reality Research at The New Museum Incubator in 2015. Since then, she has exhibited widely internationally such as K11 in Shanghai, China, The Zabludowicz Collection in London, Kiasma Museum of Art in Helsinki, Finland, HEK Museum of Art in Basel, Switzerland, Pinakothek Museum of Modern Art in Munich, Germany, The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, and The Akron Art Museum of Ohio. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The BBC, ArtForum, Wired, CNN among many others. She was a 2017 Forbes ’30 Under 30’ and her work has been the subject of many mini-documentaries such as ART21’s “New York; Close-up,” Bloomberg TV series Art+Tech, National Geographic’s series “Genius.” Her work is in public collections around the world such as The Whitney Museum of Art, The Borusan Contemporary Museum of Art in Istanbul, Turkey. Currently, she is working on a joint-commission to debut in fall of 2022 for The KW Museum of Art in Berlin, Germany and The Whitney Museum of Art in New York, New York.
Logan R. Beitmen