The Last Day

The semi-autobiographical story centers on the complexities of love and commitment in a family torn apart when faced with an unexpected tragedy.

A Minute Ago, which debuted this fall at High Art gallery in Paris, revolves around rotoscoping, the animation technique Rose calls “collaging in time and space.” Her most impressionistic work to date, the work takes its point of departure from two pieces of footage: a YouTube video of a freak summer hailstorm on a Siberian beach, and a tour given by the architect Philip Johnson of his landmark Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, just a few years before his death at age 98. “I was thinking about the relationship between shocking, catastrophic weather conditions and collage, which has a similar uncanny, suturing quality,” Rose says. Accompanied partly by a down-pitched version of Pink Floyd’s 1971 concert played “to the dead” at Pompeii, the work has an unsettling, morose quality.

Lake Valley is a cel animated film set in an imagined suburb. Each frame is a composite of elements from 19th-20th century children’s book illustrations cut, layered, and re-mapped for the present-day. The suburban places encountered in the video—the house, the parking lot, the park—are familiar and not. The story of Lake Valley follows an imagined pet as it seeks attention on one particularly lonely day. The pet leaves its family in search of connection in the nearby green. The narrative is rooted in the theme of abandonment that permeates childhood in children’s literature. Abandonment, like a suburban house, is relatively ordinary experience sustained by everyday routines and anxieties.

Wil-o-Wisp explores how the practice of magic and coincidence influence the fate of a woman named Elspeth Blake. Rose frames her story against the backdrop of England’s Enclosure Movement, which privatized communal land and spurred violent upheavals in agrarian life.Rose models the chapters of Elspeth’s life after accounts of healers persecuted for their practices, which were considered deviant and threatening within increasingly regulated society. Weaving together the harsh realities of the rural English landscape with ghostly sprites and the ethereal forces of magic, Rose questions how our perceptions of the world, and of others, can so radically change within the fluctuating norms of society and the seismic shifts of history.

Set in rural 17th-century England at the beginning of the Enclosure Acts, a series of legal maneuvers that seized communally used farmlands and privatized property ownership, Enclosure follows a fictional group of purloining travelers who call themselves the Famlee. Led by an alchemist leader, Jaccko, the group scheme to attain land through the transfer of fraudulent paper currency, manipulating unsuspecting farmers into forfeiting their autonomy. The most valuable member of The Famlee is Recent, a teenage girl trained to learn the behaviors, rituals, and shibboleths of the community in order to exploit their anxieties. Recent’s meaning within the film is exaggerated by our contemporary understanding of the relationship between capitalism and gendered division of labor; accomplice to Jaccko’s trickery, the girl becomes co-conspirator in her own entrapment.

NASA astronaut David Wolf spent 128 days aboard the Mir Space Station. That's just the start of this swirling short film.

"I shot Sitting Feeding Sleeping in a cryogenics lab, where nitrogen-pumped bodies circulate their own blood. In a robotics perception lab, where machines read human emotion. And in zoos, where animals live extended lives emptied of sexual, social, survival cues. I used these three spaces as prosthetics for understanding deathfullness­­ — being alive, feeling dead."

For this video, Palisades in Palisades, 2014, Rose wanted to expand both her conceptual concerns and her cinematographic repertoire. “I was learning how to make a shot in relation to the content,” she explains, “and how the shots were metaphors for pure sensual material.” The artist accomplished this by using a remote-control camera that could zoom from 200 feet away all the way up to the pores in an individual’s skin. She chose to shoot in New Jersey’s Palisades Interstate Park, a onetime Revolutionary War battleground turned landscaped circuit park that sits atop an ancient cliff.