Emerson Contemporary Show Contemplates Flesh and the Machine

Emerson Contemporary’s current exhibition explores the coming together of flesh, machine, cognition, and code, inspired by current research into brain-computer interfaces.

Rachel Rossin: works from The Maw Of, a solo exhibition featuring recent works commissioned by KW Institute of Art in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of American Art, will be on view in the Media Art Gallery, 25 Avery Street, through October 15. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00-6:00 pm

Rossin, a New York-based painter and digital artist, incorporates into her work painting, sculpture, new media, and more to create digital landscapes, with which she addresses aspects of disorder, embodiment, and omnipresent technology and its effect on the human psyche.

“Both Rossin’s paintings and digital works offer an immediate visual and visceral experience,” said Dr. Leonie Bradbury, Emerson’s Distinguished Curator-in-Residence. 

“Joined together they put forward an ambivalent space, one where we find ourselves entangled in shared and overlapping modes of being and in a state of mutual becoming with the virtual and the real.” 

Works from The Maw Of features a site-specific immersive installation, innovative new video works, and recent paintings. Conceived as mixed-reality theater, Rossin’s project addresses the expanded limits of technology and the human body. Through a new visual language, Rossin offers a critical response to what painting is for, and its enduring significance in our tech-dependent society.

Rossin is an internationally renowned artist and programmer, and a pioneer in the field of virtual reality. Her work has been exhibited at the KW Institute, the Whitney, Kiasma Museum of Helsinki, K11: Shanghai, The New Museum, Rhizome, the Hyundai Museum of Seoul, GAMeC (Bergamo, Italy), HeK (Basel, Switzerland), “Kim” Museum (Riga, Latvia), the Sundance Film Festival, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Casino Museum of Luxembourg. Her works are in permanent collections, including Borusan Contemporary Museum of Art (Istanbul), The Zabludowicz Collection, and the Whitney.

In addition to her artistic practice, Rossin has lectured at Stäedelschule, Google, MIT, Stanford, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been published in Video/Art: The First Fifty Years (Phaidon), Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (Onassis Foundation), and Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century (MIT Press).