FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Elliott Levenglick LLC is pleased to present Shelter of a Limping Substrate, Rachel Rossin’s solo show, featuring new oil paintings that revive ennui en plein air for our digital era.

Every rupture is also a continuity. For Rossin, the oil painting here is the artifact of a feedback loop between digital and analog processes. Substrate, in the show’s title, refers to the underlying layer in 3D imaging, the most fundamental surface upon which the rest is built. Formal plein air paintings provide the foundation for Rossin, which she then has reimagined in virtual reality CAD software. The gestural distortion of these pastoral scenes is what she captures in the final works, using the traditional medium of oil to grasp the new weariness of the cyberflaneur.

The result is a collection of pieces that stagger toward an immersion of contradictions. There’s an angst and urgency to the smudges Rossin has first made on screen and then replicated with her brush, but also a placid timelessness to the floral arabesques that reach across the canvas. Blues, pinks, greens, and violets suggest something idyllic, yet there’s a lurking sense of pain too in the virtual manipulations flexures and folds which Rossin has rendered with painterly skill. The show brings together the artist’s dual background in programming and painting seamlessly incorporating these tools into her practice. The New York Times called her recent immersive installation experienced via Oculus Rift headset (a part of her solo show “n=7/The Wake of the Heat of Collapse” at Brooklyn’s Signal Gallery) “a Dantesque virtual reality,” and this month she was named a Virtual Reality Fellow in residence at NEW INC., the New Museum’s art tech incubator.

While these new works mark the first time Rossin has so intimately brought together her command of digital and analog mediums, her paintings in the past have been shown throughout the U.S. including as a part of her first solo show “Telltale” at the Bowery Hotel Basement Annex in 2012. Recent solo shows also include Signal Gallery, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York; SchoolHouse Projects with IDEAS CITY, New York; and The Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida. Rossin works and lives in New York.

Text by Whitney Mallett