Rachel Rose. Everything and More.

An astronaut's account

Everything and More is a video installation Rachel Rose made in 2015. High definition, colour, sound, eleven minutes and thirty three seconds. The work comes with materials placed in the room: mylar, PVC and carpet.

The thread running through it is the voice of David Wolf, an astronaut who lived in space. He speaks about what the body feels where there is no gravity, and about returning to Earth, when every sense has to learn again how to work.

The images do not illustrate his words like a documentary. Rose sets footage of a large pool used for weightlessness training against close views of abstract liquids: colour spreading, swirling, dissolving into itself. Viewers do not always know what they are looking at, and that uncertainty is what the work wants to keep.

The room is part of the video

The work premiered in Rose's first solo exhibition in the United States, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, from 30 October 2015 to 7 February 2016. The show was in the fifth floor Kaufman Gallery, curated by Christopher Y. Lew. Rose, born in 1986, was in her twenties, living and working in New York.

The museum had just moved into its new building by Renzo Piano. Rose worked with that architecture. The video was not simply shown on a screen; it sat in a space rearranged so that viewers felt the room as part of the image.

Carpet underfoot, reflective mylar, plastic pipe. Ordinary materials, but placed beside weightless scenes they remind viewers that they are still standing on a floor, still heavy, still here.

Images everywhere, meaning where

The Whitney describes Rose's method as starting from a specific site or idea and linking it to broader subjects, using both her own footage and found material. Her question: when images are everywhere, how do they still produce meaning?

Everything and More answers by placing very different kinds of images side by side. The words of someone who really left the ground. A training pool built to simulate that. Tiny flows of liquid that look like galaxies. None entirely real, none entirely false.

The New Yorker called it an epic about gravities, literal and figurative. The pull of the Earth, and the pull of whatever makes people want to stay, and to return.

Why those eleven minutes remain

Many videos about space stop at the sublime. Rose goes the other way. She cares about the small body sensing, not the vast universe seen.

That is why the work reaches people who never think about space. Everyone has felt their body turn strange: after a fever, after a long flight, stepping out of a pool and feeling heavy again. Rose takes those moments and stretches them.

Among video works that use water and the body, it stands near the elemental screens of Bill Viola and Kira Perov, but lighter, less ceremonial, closer to daily life.

Leaving the room, viewers step into the museum corridor. Feet on the floor. Gravity is there as always. For a few seconds, though, it feels like something new.