The Last Day (2023) is a seven-minute video by Rachel Rose comprising thousands medium format photographs shot in her children’s bedroom. Rose composed a series of still lifes from the toys and everyday objects found in a child’s nursery.
The work is structured in seven days, and in each day, she lit the still lifes sequentially from sunrise into night. Each day’s still life—from a bottle of milk to a pile of construction trucks—symbolises a different epoch in the history of the earth. A bottle of milk stands in for the early amorphous, pre-vegetal world, a rubber bathtub toy illustrates ocean life, trucks become ciphers for late industrialisation.
On the last, seventh day, the artist made a radar sensor-enabled carpet which acts central protagonist, emitting light depending on its proximity to humans, ominously signalling the end of times.
The work lays bare that the history of earth’s landscape—from the primordial, to the prehistoric, to the industrialised and into the near future—is embedded in the development of imagination.
2023, 7 minutes
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Rachel Rose lives and works in New York. Her work explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. Rose’s films draw from and contribute to the long history of cinematic innovation; whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walk, Rose directs our attention to sites and histories in which the sublime and the everyday blur. She translates this in her paintings, sculptures and drawings, which materially reverberate with one another, connecting the immediate to deep time. Instagram
© Rachel Rose; Supported by SITE Santa Fe, LUMA Arles, and Google. Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, New York, Brussels, and Seoul, and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London