Rachel Rose: Palisades, Serpentine Sackler Gallery ★★★★★

Rachel Rose is a young American artist on the brink of world domination. Not only is the Serpentine Sackler Gallery hosting her first solo show in London, Rose is preparing for a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York later in the year and is the winner of the 2015 Frieze Artist Award. An impressive array of accolades for an artist that only graduated from Columbia in 2013.
What's all the fuss about?
Rose is best known for striking video installations that nimbly weave images, sounds and environments together to consider overarching (and at times unrelated) themes. Her most recent work, A Minute Ago (2014), captures the moment a violent hailstorm disrupted the frivolities of a sunny day at the beach, overlaid with footage of architect Philip Johnson's Glass House. These ideas of catastrophe and the frailty of life often reappear in Rose's work, which toys with video footage like a tangible material that can be stretched and moulded.
Serpentine Sackler Gallery exhibition
Responding to the Serpentine Galleries, Rose has created a unique immersive environment. There's a cacophany of sound as you enter, with the haunting riffs of 'bang bang he shot me down' coming from one corner and eerie noises snapped from the two videos on display, A Minute Ago and Palisades in Palisades (2014). Weaving through the historic passages of the Sackler Gallery, you'll come across two spaces to watch the poetic films.
In Palisades in Palisades, Rose bounces between intense closeups of a young girl with vivid blue mascara and a blue jumper, standing on the banks of the Hudson River, to images of the American Revolutionary War that raged on the same spot. The blue that reverberates throughout the haunting video cleverly reappears in the curating of the show which invites visitors to watch sitting on plush blue carpet.
While you might think video art is a lot of codswallop, this exhibition is powerful and heralds the birth of a star. With nods from powerful tastemakers in London and New York, Rachel Rose is fast becoming one of our favourites and is definitely a contemporary artist to keep an eye on.