SITE Santa Fe Presents good night moona new personal exhibition by Rachel Rose to be seen until September 11th. The exhibition features new and recent sculpture and installation work, as well as recently commissioned video work and notable historical loans from the Yale Center for British Art.
good night moon centers Rose’s 2019 film “Enclosure,” originally co-commissioned by the LUMA Foundation and Park Avenue Armory. He hovers on the edge of magical realism in his gripping and rigorously researched account of the catastrophic social, psychological and ecological impact of the rise of capitalism in seventeenth-century agrarian England. A collection of historical drawings and paintings by Samuel Palmer, John Linnell and William Blake – on loan from the Yale Center of British Art – directly inspired his view of this vast body of work.
“Rose’s earliest artistic training was painting, and although she is perhaps best known for her film installations, the history of painting, including theories of composition and color, has always been at the heart of his work”, explains SITE Santa Fe curator Brandee Caoba.
Complementing the film are several sculptures called “Loops”, which combine rock and glass in artifacts that seem to come from the landscape of another era. While rock and glass may initially appear as two distinct entities, the “loops” actually illustrate two states of the same material: sand. However, where sand heated for blown glass hardens almost instantly, rock takes thousands of years to form.
The sensation of compressing all the time into a single work of art reappears in “The Last Day” (2023), a five-minute film premiering at SITE Santa Fe. Consisting of 1,800 medium-format photographs of the bedroom of his children, the work depicts seven days, each representing an era in world history. Beginning before life and culminating with the end of time, a woven nano-light rug co-created with Google and installed in the bedroom is meant to create a sense of no-place, no-time, and nowhere .
Also presented for the first time at SITE Santa Fe, a new series of photographs, groundhog day. Inspired by the eponymous 1993 comedy about living endlessly on the same day, Rose’s collection of 24 photos documents every hour of her waking day on February 2, 2023. The installation reflects the last day of “The Last Day “, with references in the white floor and floating canvas ceiling.
Audio guides accompanying the exhibition are available in English and Spanish.
good night moon is organized by Brandee Caoba.
A full schedule of public programs will take place throughout the exhibition.
For more information, visit www.santafe.org.
