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Home » News » BFA '09 Rachel Rossin Featured in the New York Times

BFA '09 Rachel Rossin Featured in the New York Times

Published November 6, 2015

In Rachel Rossin’s ‘Lossy,’ the Virtual Reality of Living in a Painting

As written by Martha Schwendener on November 5th, 2015:

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.

Neither Ms. Rossin’s paintings nor the virtual reality piece, however, feel like fully realized masterpieces. “Digital painting” has always seemed like an oxymoron: The tactility of painting, and its static depiction or recording of movement, are part of the medium’s appeal. But Ms. Rossin has achieved something, forging a connection between abstract painting and augmented perception that opens up a fourth dimension that existed only in theory for earlier painters.

‘Lossy’ has also been featured in:

The Creators Project: Virtual Reality Paintings Destroy Notions of the “Still Life”
Observer
: How One Artist Uses Virtual Reality as her Medium
Artnet: David Ebony’s Top 10 New York Gallery Shows
Artinfo: 5 Must-See Shows in New York
Art Report: The Juncture Between Concept & Canvas, as shown by Rachel Rossin