Rachel Rose’s Childhood Imaginings
at Gladstone Gallery

How does a child see their surroundings? How does their imagination morph their perceptions? Such questions played on Rachel Rose's mind as she planned her Gladstone Gallery show.

Time is of the essence for the New York-based artist who seeks the sublime in the everyday. For her solo exhibition, The Story (18 March–6 May 2023) at Gladstone Gallery, Seoul, the artist distilled illustrations from the books she reads to her children to create daily landscapes from a child's perspective.

Rose spoke with Ocula Advisory about this new group of drawings, the moments that inspired her exhibition in Seoul, and her projects for the rest of 2023.

What is a typical day in the studio for you?

It very much depends on the project. Right now, I'm working on a series of shows, one of which includes a new work (The Last Day, 2023) composed of over 4,000 medium-format photographs I took inside my kids' bedroom compressed into a four-minute video.

Every day, I set up and shoot a still-life in their bedroom. Afterwards, I take the images back to the studio, situate myself in my to-do list, and begin editing what I've shot.

Since having kids, the mundane tasks of family life have become a basis and fountain for my work. I look for the sublime within the everyday. In the evenings, I work at home once they go to bed. Seeing them grow so quickly has put into focus that my time is precious, so I try to use it wisely.

You are best known for your video installations. Can you talk about your decision to bring these drawings and sculptures to Seoul?

In this new group of drawings, I'm looking at the daily rituals that comprise a kid's life: drinking milk, taking a nap, having a bath, or running to the park. It's in each of these moments in our early development that we develop our likes and dislikes, wants and desires, and essentially our identity.

I took illustrations from the books I read my kids daily and removed the colour and extraneous backgrounds, extracting only the lines. I then created new drawings replicating these pure lines meticulously by hand, weaving in my own lines as I do.

In this distillation process of redrawing the old and drawing the new, I created these daily life landscapes from a child's perspective—the blurring of imagination and reality, while seeing the outside world infused with the inside self.

This is about how children are seeing and how they see is always transforming in their imagination. It swirls and morphs with their projects and associations.

The exhibition text is lifted from 'Snow White', the Brothers Grimm fairytale. What is it about this story that took your interest?

The majority of Grimm Brother's fairy tales are amalgamations of the folkloric stories that were passed down through generations to covertly instruct children about lessons in morality, danger and virtue.

Alissa Bennett, Gladstone Gallery's director, wrote this exhibition text thinking about how a child understands and absorbs a story. Large sections of the text have been redacted, yet as a story that has been so ingrained by in our culture, readers will automatically fill the gaps.

A child on the other hand would use these lapses as places to fantasise. When I read to my children, they drift in and out of the narrative, making all kinds of subtractions, while developing new fantastical additions.

Most drawings in the show are black and white, but a couple have red in them. Why?

I applied small spots of red to the subject or object of the work. The red paint grounds each landscape and places focus on one thing.

In The Present (2023), only the ribbon wrapping the present is red. I was thinking about Marcel Duchamp's readymade, Pharmacy (1914), which was a drawing he made based on a commercially produced print of a winter landscape. He daubed marks of red and green on top—a clear palette reference to contemporaneous pharmaceutical bottles.

Duchamp spoke of the dots as tiny figures walking towards each other in the distance, but I also think of them as transmutations of the landscape re-situated back in. They focus the viewer's eye inside the forest, making the forest the pharmacy.

I thought about colour as a method to focus the story of each image and a way to link each work together. Each had at least a daub of red to signify that this is all taking place in one day.

The exhibition features two sculptures set among the drawings. How are they related to the drawings, and how do they connect with your 'Borns' (2019–2021) sculpture series?

The two sculptures are made of blown glass. Glass is an innately ambivalent material; it's the one material that's classified as neither liquid nor solid—it's both.

The two 'Loops' (2021-present) in this exhibition are related to the 'Borns' insofar as they were both made by pouring molten hot glass against a rock. However, instead of re-affixing the rock and glass together, I removed the rock and left the glass, which then hangs in the air with the imprint of the rock in its form.

They remind me of this sand timer that sits on my studio desk. I use it to chart the day and remember time is precious. The two sculptures are titled Loop (morning) (2023) and Loop (night) (2023). Glass is sand, literally pulverised rock, so these 'Loops' feel a bit like frozen timers.

What's next for you?

I'm working on a number of shows opening later this year: a survey with a new commission at SITE Santa Fe in June, a new work for LUMA Arles as part of a collaboration with Google and the French art centre in July, and finally, a survey at GL STRAND, Copenhagen, later in the year. —[O]