BFA ’09 Rachel Rossin Explores Virtual Reality Through Digital Paintings

FSU Art BFA ’09 Rachel Rossin’s exhibition “Lossy” that ran from October 15-Novemeber 14th, 2015 at Zither Smith & Horton was reviewed by several publications, including Artforum, the New York Times, and an article by the Huffington Post. Rachel is currently a Virtual Reality Fellow at the New Museum.
Illya Szilak of The Huffington Post describes her experience with the Virtual Reality Paintings:

Sitting in a swivel office chair at The New Museum’s incubator lab on the Lower East Side, I glide effortlessly across a horizonless, watery blue sky. My gaze has become a force of nature. It pulls me past a distorted refrigerator. I skim over potted plants, a bed, a painting. Bracing myself for impact, I dissolve like a ghost into a hazy open staircase that leads nowhere, and out the other side. The music ends. I make no attempt to move. I’m a little in awe like I’ve just seen the future. Rachel Rossin, the Virtual Reality Fellow at NEW INC, removes my earbuds. “It’s over,” she says, meaning “take off that Oculus Rift and get back to this other reality.”

According to the New York Times:

To create this work, Ms. Rossin scanned bits of her paintings and images photographed in her studio and apartment and created a two-and-a-half minute video that you experience by donning a Rift headset. Unlike the seamless environment you generally see in video games, Ms. Rossin’s includes lots of white space; objects and fragmented forms float within it, occasionally disintegrating — hence the “lossy” in the exhibition’s title, a word that suggests entropy in the coding of digital images or sound) on what feels like near impact with your eye. Where virtual reality has been criticized for leaving you disoriented or queasy, isolating the eye in this manner simulates the fantasy of living inside a painting or having painterly images converge with your retina. The effect is destabilizing and exhilarating.

Rachel Rossin’s virtual reality paintings have been exhibited in a multiple venues, including Untitled Miami  and The New Museum.

Rachel’s work has been featured in:
Artforum
The New York Times
Huffington Post
The Creators Project
Observer
Artnet
Artinfo
Art Report
Fashion Week