Rachel Rossin, who lives and works in New York, is a multimedia artist and self-taught programmer who works in painting, installation and virtual reality. In her work she draws together traditional art-making techniques, such as painting, with new technologies such as virtual reality and hologram projections to examine the slippage between the real and the digital, between perceptual and embodied space. Greasy Light presents a new body of work by the artist in which she refers to the smeariness of the quality of paint and color in translating the space. Thick and fleshy paint is applied to the canvas with both an expressive and figurative gesture to highlight and describe the paint’s physical property. Pushing the medium’s boundaries, paint is annotated by hologram projections, a technology that is used for commercial signage and advertising. Suspended above the fleshy paintings, the recursive holographic annotations act as self-referential icons that express the virtual space that the paintings are made from. Fading the virtual and the real is further highlighted in the figurative elements of her paintings that are based on images of demons referencing daemons, a computer program that runs as a background process. By blending and twisting inherent meanings of real life scenarios, video games and stock computer images, Rachel Rossin creates a space and a narrative that is neither virtual or real but a fusion of the two. It gives the viewer a glimpse of how the digital fades more and more into our ‘real’ life raising the question of where reality lies.
