Overview
Goodnight Moon centres Rose’s 2019 film, Enclosure, originally co-commissioned by LUMA Foundation and Park Avenue Armory. The film teeters on the edge of magical realism in its gripping and rigorously researched narrative about the catastrophic social, psychological and ecological impact of the advent of capitalism in 17th-century agrarian England. Alongside the film and sculptures are a collection of historic drawings and paintings on loan from the Yale Center of British Art by Samuel Palmer, John Linnell and William Blake. These works directly inspired Rose’s vision for this expansive body of work.
Complementing the film are several sculptures called Loops, which combine rock and glass into artifacts that seem to hail from the landscape of another time. Though the rock and glass may initially appear as two distinct entities, Loops illustrate two states of the same material: sand. However, where sand heated for blown glass sets almost instantly, rock takes thousands of years to form.
The sensation of compressing all time into a single artwork reappears in Rose's The Last Day (2023), a five-minute film that will premiere at this exhibition. Composed of 1,800 medium-format photographs of her children’s bedroom, the work depicts seven days, each representing an epoch in world history. Starting before life and culminating with the end of time, a carpet woven of nano lights co-created with Google and installed in the bedroom creates a sense of non-place, non-time, nowhere-ness.
Also shown for the first time will be Rose’s new series of photographs entitled Groundhog Day. Inspired by the eponymous 1993 comedy about endlessly living the same day, Rose’s collection of 24 photos documents every hour of her waking day on Groundhog Day, 2 February 2023. The installation Groundhog Day mirrors the final day imaged within The Last Day, with the illuminated carpet referenced in the white floor and floating scrim ceiling.
