The titular piece of the exhibition Palisades (2014) was a wonderful blurring of time and place, vision and audio and set up on one screen in it's own space. Set in various time zones Rose uses tromp-loeil editing techniques to create almost optical illusions to link together a present day character in the Palisades Interstate Park in New York on the banks of the Hudson to different moments in the sites history. Through the juxtaposition and collision of apparently unrelated events Rose links the present day to historic battles in the US Revolutionary War to create a path of historical connectivity, morality, lessons and the circular repetition of history. The piece segues from current footage of the girl in the park creating ghosts of the past events from old paintings moving from extreme close ups of the woven fabric of her jumper to an almost graphic match edit of the pattern of an old etching pulling back to reveal a famous ship battle in the Hudson. The same is done with images of a deer in a painting being shot, cutting to an almost internal view of it happening blood red and then dissolving into a bright orange/red plastic bag bringing us back through a zoom out into present day Palisades. The piece feature no real cuts as the transitions between shots inter fold and dissolve through to one another further distorting not only the images but also the past and present.
The sound is also an exercise in building narrative and story. A sigh sound bridges past and present, shouts, screams and gunfire and cannons bring moving images of old paintings to life. Most strikingly a subverted version of Bang Bang (My baby shot me down) by Nancy Sinatra weaves to gather the past and present. I use of sound was amazing and sparse and focussed rather than an onslaught. It drew on a variety of effects from atmosphere, voices, ambience, music, library and possibly foley to build and create meaning. Meryl Streep's voice whispering "I am the voice of dead people" flows into a static which crackle which then in turn changes into historical gunfire. Without a shadow of a doubt the audio mix was as important as the visuals and the glue that at times held everything together. The outside of the gallery wrap-around walkway further enhanced the importance of this using a newly imagined mix soundscape from Palisades and A Minute Ago on a multitude of speakers so the sound literally moved, swallowed, chased, haunted and followed you as you went around the exterior walkway.
Palisades was hugely inspiring and vindicated the use of multiple layers of sound and how important it could be in my own work. It complemented the visuals but also added a whole new depth and layer of understanding sometimes parallel to the images but sometimes contrapuntal. Although only a one screen installation the piece intertwined excellently the wast array of topics and time zones, narratives and character. The piece zig zags about in history but still with a narrative thread of sorts veering from everyday life to the epic sweep of history. The way it did this was hugely inspiring and demonstrated that a narrative could be multi fractured and yet still coherent.
A Minute Ago (2014) was the companion piece to Palisades in the exhibition and is a one screen installation in it's own space. It starts with a happy scene with people enjoying a day on a Siberian beach that suddenly turns into a nightmare as in a matter of seconds an apocalyptic hailstorm batters the people some to a state of severe injury and fighters the rest as they seek shelter wherever possible. It is shot like a home movie and is certainly found archive footage and is subtitled. From voices stating "So wonderful" the shouts of the people change quickly and drastically to cries of"Get to cover", "Oh shit", "It does not happen", "Hoooly shit" and "If we die know I love you". Pink Floyds "Echoes" plays subtly in the background but more haunting than usual apparently recorded being played in an empty amphitheatre in Pompeii, obviously itself the scene of natural devastation. The message is clear and the visuals biblical as the hailstorm erupts at the location and we are forced to see our relationship to nature, our weakness at the mercy of it and question how volatile this order is.
The beach section of the film is then suddenly replaced by cityscapes of glass buildings before settling on scenes of Architect Philip Johnson's "Glass House". At the onset of these the horrific sound from the beach footage accompanies them and their plashed surfaces and camera moves provide an interesting correlation. The images represent out taming of nature and sheltering ourselves from it yet due to the material (glass) we are still connected to it the outside in an interesting juxtaposition. Rose rotoscopes old VHS footage of Johnson himself a blurred mumbling figure with footage shot herself of the Glasshouse itself as he guides us around his creation. Syncopated Jazz drumming links cuts to the beat as we see other architectural images destroyed villages, stately homes linking again to our attempts to shelter us from nature. In the end the Glass house is fractured using motion graphics and effects shattering in to a million pieces piece by piece perhaps again representing our fragility in the natural world.
To me the piece raised some fascinating and primeval issues and themes just as applicable today as in the beginning of time. Fear of impending catastrophe, ecological issues (global warming) and the advancement of technology trying to harness and answer both of these. Like Palisades Rose has created questions and debate by her combination and choice of images but perhaps this time the message is less opaque and more clunky and transparent and for this reason I feel Palisades is the more accomplished piece. However once again the use of sound is integral to the piece and is something I wish to incorporate into my own work. It also demonstrates the possibility of what can be achieved on a one screen installation which is something I had dismissed possibly from my own work and a desire to create multi-screen pieces. If the content is a vast deep tapestry and collage of intertwined ideas, footage and layers of sound the work can be just as powerful. As a footnote it was interesting to see that there was an event linked to the exhibition with Rachel Rose in conversation with a hero of mine Walter Murch. Murch is primarily known as a film editor having worked extensively with Lucas, Copolla and Minguella to name but a few. He is also credited with inventing the term "Sound design" in films with his amazing work on "Apocalypse Now" and it interesting to me that the sound work of Rachel Rose in her installations bears striking similarities.
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