For the 2024 Young Collectors Council Party, presented by LG Display, art and technology worked in tandem to immerse attendees
For more than six months, visionary painter and programmer Rachel Rossin developed tactile, yet shifting sculptures alongside interactive digital artwork on eight LG Transparent OLED screens to transform the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum rotunda into an otherworldly escape that lasted only one night. The occasion was the Guggenheim‘s Young Collectors Council Party, an annual art immersion for patrons and artists—and Rossin, who once allowed this CH editor to step into the middle of pyroclastic explosion and manipulate time by stepping forward and backward (through her groundbreaking VR masterpiece, “The Sky is a Gap,” at Sundance in 2017), was selected as the official collaborator.
Each layer to Rossin’s work harks back to her dynamic process of developing art in both the digital and physical realms. “Noam Segal, the new curator of digital media at the Guggenheim, approached me about this commission,” Rossin explains to COOL HUNTING. To orchestrate various pieces within one of New York City’s most famous architectural creations, the artist began to build each engaging element in a virtual reality mock-up of the museum’s rotunda. “I made the simulation in a game engine,” she says. “I got to sketch it up in virtual reality, within the structure of the Guggenheim.”
The team leading LG Display thought Rossin was an appropriate fit for partnership because they’d already observed her works exploring the relationship between holograms and sculptures. “It was a seamless process to work with them. I’ve always wanted to make hologram-combine sculptures, so it was a great way to try to create those at this scale, which was 10-feet tall in the rotunda of the Guggenheim. This felt like a type of heist in the space,” she says.
This series will mark a transition in Rossin’s career. “After three or four years working at the KW in Berlin, on their commission, and then the show at the Whitney, and then the public commission at the Cistern in Houston, which is on a scale of two football fields, I am really excited to be done for a while with working at this scale. I love working on a larger scale but because I’ve been doing it for more than three years, I’m really excited to be working on a new series of smaller paintings that’s related to these hologram-combine sculptures—and to have some time.”
Rossin’s works—some of which presented humanlike forms, others floral crowns and architectural elements—rose amidst two current Guggenheim exhibitions, Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility and By Way Of: Material and Motion in the Guggenheim Collection. Proceeds from the spectacular event directly benefited the Guggenheim, as well as the Young Collectors Council Art Fund—which supports both emerging and established artists, and enables contributions to the museum’s permanent collection.
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