Sometimes, going to the movies can feel like a process of disassembly and reconstitution—not in a lofty, philosophical sense but in a basic, physical one, as though the instruments your body uses to recognize the world have been remade. The artist Rachel Rose had this experience in 2014, when she saw the film “Gravity,” and, leaving the theater, felt “a very confusing sense of displacement from earth.” The video work that she made afterward, “Everything and More,” arose from a desire to deconstruct how this feeling could be produced simply by an encounter with sound emitted from speakers and light particles thrown off a flat surface. The piece, which was the subject of a solo show at the Whitney that opened in 2015, layers the voice of an astronaut talking about how he felt upon returning from space (smells are stronger; his wristwatch feels heavy, “like a bowling ball”) with footage of researchers in a neutral-buoyancy lab and shimmering liquids fusing together and breaking apart. The work suggests that you might think of your body as a kind of sensory sieve, your mind a wisp of consciousness enclosed by a permeable membrane.
Each of Rose’s films has explored how the perceptual experiences of human beings are shaped by the physical, social, economic, and technological structures that are particular to a certain time. In “A Minute Ago” (2014), a piece that Rose made after Hurricane Sandy, she combined a clip of a sudden summer’s day hailstorm on a…
