2019 RACHEL ROSSIN
Rachel Rossin exploits the relatively unreal, fragile, transient nature of flowers — their ontological thinness — as a way to explore the fate of “the real” in an age of virtuality.
Rossin’s process for creating her recent flower paintings begins on the computer, with a Virtual Reality modeling program that allows her to sculpt three-dimensional flowers from virtual clay. The artist works entirely from imagination and memory, leaving gaps and unfinished areas where necessary rather than turning to reference sources to flesh out the forms perfectly. The point, after all, is not straight mimesis but rather an exploration of the relative ontological reality of forms as they pass through various stages of mental, digital, and material mediations. The VR program also allows Rossin to automatically adjust the images according to the atmospheric and weather conditions and angle of sunlight found anywhere on the planet. For the works in the present exhibition, she inputted the geographic coordinates for West Palm Beach, Florida—Rossin’s hometown. The specificity of place, inextricable from her own childhood, lends a Proustian quality to the work, infusing her fictive, virtual flowers with a memory of rootedness.
Once she brings her virtual flowers to a satisfactory level of completeness, Rossin begins a process of hand-painting them by careful, sustained observation. “They’re plein-air paintings of virtual flowers,” she explains, well aware of the irony of making “plein-air” paintings of imaginary objects that only exist in the airless space of virtuality. She makes no effort to conceal her flowers’ immateriality or ontological thinness but rather leaves in any glitches or moments of “lossy” ( image deterioration) from her digital process as she translates the images into paint. In fact, her flowers’ shadows often appear weightier and more substantial than the flowers themselves. The seriousness with which Rossin approaches the act of painting, as evidenced by the controlled specificity of her color-mixing and the delicacy of her marks, indicates the extent of Rossin’s investment in the ontology of virtuality. She takes virtual space seriously enough to reconstruct it by hand with the attentive sensitivity of a Monet or a Cézanne.