Artist:
Rachel Rose (born 1986; lives and works in New York City, USA).

Materials:
HD video; 8 minutes 43 seconds.

Description:
“In A Minute Ago […] Rose presents found footage of an idyllic beach scene interrupted by an apocalyptic hailstorm. As the freak weather rages overhead, people take shelter as a voice intones, ‘If we die, know that I love you.’ The image is laden with further menace by a soundtrack consisting of a funerary march of a guitar song. The footage shifts to the blurry figure of the architect Philip Johnson giving a tour of his famous home, the Glass House, built in 1945. For the film, Rose re-shot the house exactly as it appeared in the interview, superimposing Johnson’s rotoscoped figure back over the top. As the artist has previously stated in interviews, this gesture creates two parallel states and the elderly architect occupies the building as a ghost. The scene is interrupted with images of Nicholas Poussin’s The Funeral of Phocion (1648), which Johnson famously bought in 1945 on the recommendation of Alfred H. Barr. A Minute Ago seems to hint at an ecological anxiety, contrasting the architectural urge to regulate against nature’s continual aberrancy. As the film progresses, the house begins to dissolve. Accompanied by a percussive backbeat, we move from a glacial to a more accelerated pace, the film’s rich iconography becoming abstracted and musical.  Rose’s practice is often described as painterly and her ruminations on mortality, ecology and art history are married to her attuned formal sensibilities.”
—George Vasey, “Rachel Rose,” Kaleidoscope 25, Fall 2015.

“In A Minute Ago, roughly nine minutes long, she offers three visual/narrative layers: footage of a hailstorm in Siberia, taken from YouTube; video of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut; and an interview of Johnson, whose silhouette she has blurred and laid over some of the Glass House footage, his figure wandering through the frames like a ghostly apparition.”
—Federico Florian, “Rachel Rose at the Serpentine Sackler, London,” Art in America, January 25, 2106.