Rachel Rossin


Rachel Rossin is a multi-media and installation artist based in New York City.

Personal life

When Rossin was 16, her mother brought her to the Whitney Museum of American Art where she was attracted to Kiki Smith’s wax figures. Rossin expressed that the gallery exhibition had a profound impact on her career, saying “I hated them and I loved them because they were both repulsive and tender. These feelings kept competing and rolling over each other for the front of my mind."

Career

Solo Work

In 2015, Rossin's exhibition, N=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse, located at SIGNAL in New [York, New York], was a virtual reality simulation that employs the structure of side-scrolling gameplay to create an immersive, Oculus Rift-based experience. Additionally, in 2015, Rossin held her work, Shelter of a Limping Substrate, at the Elliott Levenglick Gallery. Shelter of a Limping Substrate refers to the underlying layer in 3D imaging. She created formal en plein air paintings, which then were reimagined in virtual reality CAD software.
From October 15—November 14, 2015, Rachel held her work, Lossy, at the ZieherSmith, a contemporary art gallery in New York City. In Rossin's words: “The exhibition posits that our relationship with reality isn't a separate virtual and real but looks more like a gradient between the two— with most of our modern lives being lived in the action of hopping from screen to screen. Like lossy compression, this process includes entropy as an inherent given— in optimizing what already exists by omitting the excess in worlds with their own internal logic.”
From December 9, 2016—January 15, 2017, the exhibition, My Little Green Leaf was held in partnership with Art in General and kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Latvia. The installation piece interweaves the viewers interactive experience with virtual reality and physical space.
In 2017, she debuted a piece The Sky is a Gap, where she mapped a room-scale virtual reality installation to move 3D time and explosions by the user's movements.

Group work

From January 19 to March 3, 2017, Rachel Rossin participated in The Unframed World: Virtual Reality as Artistic Medium for the 21st Century at HeK in Basel, Switzerland, a group exhibition exploring artistic approaches to virtual reality. From March 17 to May 31, 2017, she took part in After Us at K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, China, presented in collaboration with the New Museum, which examined how Chinese and international artists use surrogates, proxies, and avatars to expand notions of being human. She was also included in ARS17: Hello World! A Survey of Contemporary Art on the Theme of Digital Revolution at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, which ran from March 31, 2017, to January 14, 2018, presenting international artists engaging with themes of digital transformation. In 2018, Rossin collaborated with Cecilia Salama on a store installation for Brazilian shoe company Melissa, with her video piece displayed on large pixelated screens in the store lobby. In 2022, she participated in Signals at Someday Gallery, New York, a group exhibition exploring digital and physical materiality. In 2023, she was included in Refigured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which showcased works addressing the intersection of digital and physical materiality. In 2024, Rossin presented Haha Real, a site-specific media and sound installation at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston, Texas, which transformed the underground space into an immersive experience inspired by the classic children's story The Velveteen Rabbit and featured an original soundscape by musician Frewuhn.

Awards and Fellowships