Rachel Rossin (born 1987, West Palm Beach, Florida) is a multi-media and installation artist based in New York City. Whitney Museum of American Art describes Rossin as "a painter and programmer whose multi-disciplinary practice has established her as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality. Her work blends painting, sculpture, new media, gaming, and video to create digital landscapes that focus on entropy, embodiment, the ubiquity of technology and its effect on our psychology."
When Rossin was 16, her mother brought her to the Whitney Museum of American Art where she was attracted to Kiki SmithâÂÂs wax figures. Rossin expressed that the gallery exhibition had a profound impact on her career, saying âÂÂI hated them and I loved them because they were both repulsive and tender. These feelings kept competing and rolling over each other for the front of my mind."
In 2024, Rossin presented Haha Real, a site-specific installation made for Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, a former underground reservoir. The work was inspired by Rossin's favorite childhood story "The Velveteen Rabbit," and was set across the vast scale of the space using "technical production, where spotlights comb the cisternâÂÂs vast architecture in conversation with 8-channel video."
In 2022, the KW Institute of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art co-commissioned THE MAW OF, âÂÂa transmedia storyâÂÂa narrative unfolding across multiple platforms and formatsâÂÂthat reflects on the ways in which our bodies and minds are increasingly merging with and altered by technology.â The exhibition was first presented at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2022, before traveling in 2023 to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and then to the Emerson Contemporary Museum of Art, Boston, MA.
In 2017, she debuted a piece The Sky is a Gap, where she mapped a room-scale virtual reality installation to move 3D time and explosions by the user's movements.
From December 9, 2016âÂÂJanuary 15, 2017, the exhibition, My Little Green Leaf was held in partnership with Art in General and kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Latvia. The installation piece interweaves the viewers interactive experience with virtual reality and physical space.
In 2015, Rossin's exhibition, N=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse, located at SIGNAL in New York, New York, was a virtual reality simulation that employs the structure of side-scrolling gameplay to create an immersive, Oculus Rift-based experience. Additionally, in 2015, Rossin held her work, Shelter of a Limping Substrate, at the Elliott Levenglick Gallery. Shelter of a Limping Substrate refers to the underlying layer in 3D imaging. She created formal en plein air paintings, which then were reimagined in virtual reality CAD software.
From October 15âÂÂNovember 14, 2015, Rachel held her work, Lossy, at the ZieherSmith, a contemporary art gallery in New York City. In Rossin's words: âÂÂThe exhibition posits that our relationship with reality isn't a separate virtual and real but looks more like a gradient between the twoâ with most of our modern lives being lived in the action of hopping from screen to screen. Like lossy compression, this process includes entropy as an inherent givenâ in optimizing what already exists by omitting the excess in worlds with their own internal logic.âÂÂ
In 2024, Rossin was featured in Poetics of Encryption at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, a group presentation that built on concepts addressed in the 2023 book "Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene" by Nadim Samman.
In 2023, Rossin was included in Refigured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which showcased works addressing the intersection of digital and physical materiality.
In 2022, Rossin participated in Signals at Someday Gallery, New York, a group exhibition exploring digital and physical materiality.
In 2018, Rossin collaborated with Cecilia Salama on a store installation for Brazilian shoe company Melissa, with her video piece displayed on large pixelated screens in the store lobby.
In 2017 Rossin, took part in After Us at K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, China, presented in collaboration with the New Museum, which examined how Chinese and international artists use surrogates, proxies, and avatars to expand notions of being human. She was also included in ARS17: Hello World! A Survey of Contemporary Art on the Theme of Digital Revolution at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, which ran from March 31, 2017, to January 14, 2018, presenting international artists engaging with themes of digital transformation. From January 19 to March 3, 2017, Rachel Rossin participated in The Unframed World: Virtual Reality as Artistic Medium for the 21st Century at HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) in Basel, Switzerland, a group exhibition exploring artistic approaches to virtual reality. From March 17 to May 31, 2017, she took part in After Us at K11 Art Museum in Shanghai, China, presented in collaboration with the New Museum, which examined how Chinese and international artists use surrogates, proxies, and avatars to expand notions of being human.
Rachel Rossin is represented by Magenta Plains in New York, NY. In 2021, Magenta Plains presented its first solo exhibition of Rossin's work, Boohoo Stamina which showcased recent multimedia paintings. Dawn Chan reviewed Boohoo Stamina for the New York Times, writing "RossinâÂÂs take is strangely compelling. At times, her compositions evoke the visionary, spray-painted works of the Romanian-American artist Hedda Sterne, to terrific effect. At other times, Rossin somehow gets her brush marks to replicate the pixelated feel of virtual-reality worlds." In 2023, Magenta Plains exhibited Scry, a solo presentation of trans-media paintings and larger scale installation.
In 2025, Rossin presented The Totalists, a solo exhibition of paintings informed by "custom AI software employing her own artistic oeuvre as its dataset." The works centered on the concept of the âÂÂblack boxâ as a lens for exploring the relationship between contemporary human experience and the hidden technological infrastructures that shape it.