Reality-Settings

Sabrina Ratté

Arsenal Contemporary Art New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Sabrina Ratté.

Through her work Sabrina Ratté’s enables the visualization of speculative futures exposing new and potential worlds. The interactive installation Objets-Monde presents a vast, uninhabited landscape, where the remains of psychedelically-colored car wrecks and old-school cathode-ray tube monitors are the last vestiges of a former culture. Traces of the effects of the Anthropocene are also found in the Floralia video quartet. Samples of then extinct roses, hydrangeas, ferns and glaciers, are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive.

Ratté’s subject matter is inspired by a wide range of sources: the writings of Donna J. Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, Greg Egan; the drawings of Hans Bellmer; Greek mythology and the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The cyborgs/goddesses in the large-scale Monades prints embody Leibniz’s concept of the monad, where each individual is a fragmented mirror of a larger reality. The interactive multi-screen installation Distributed Memories presents multiple memories simultaneously by bombarding us with Ratté’s video outtakes and experiments from over ten years of creation. The animated video canvases of Radiances present seductive surfaces and painterly textures, highlighting Ratté’s ability to, as she calls it, paint with electronic light.

Using photogrammetry to scan objects, plants and her own body, Ratté combines elements from the real world into her 3D animations. Through a combination of analog technologies (video synthesis and visual feedback), 3D animation and digital effects, Ratté’s imaginary worlds always retain an echo of our current existence. These relics from the past are seen in Objets-Monde, where she imagines how life is transformed after humans are gone. Or in Floralia, where an electricity-like interference in the video signal is caused by memories emanating from the archived plants. The captivating and bewitching way Ratté fuses electronic and human memory, the apocalyptic with nostalgia, preciousness and waste, idealized nature and the indelible presence of humans in the exhibition Reality-Settings, is a contemporary Siren song that cannot be resisted.

Written by Christine Redfern / ELLEPHANT