Rachel Rose: Lake Valley

Balancing notions of tedium, adventure, abandonment, and companionship, Lake Valley presents a colorful world of fantastic visuals and familiar emotions to tell the story of a pet that leaves its family’s suburban home to look for friendship in an ethereal landscape.  

Rachel Rose creates video artworks inventively combining collage, found footage, and repurposed materials. This work emerged from the artist’s research into historical understandings of childhood and her discovery that many narratives written for children involve themes of abandonment and loneliness. 

To create the textured layers of Lake Valley, she gathered thousands of images from nineteenth and twentieth century children’s books and used them in unexpected ways to compose the frames of digitally painted cel animation.  

The sound editing of Lake Valley is similarly unexpected as actions are accompanied by recognizable but strange noises. These moments of discordance and the shifting, hypnotic visuals subtly emphasize the disorientation of being lost and alone.  

As a result, Lake Valley presents a sumptuous and transfixing storybook world that explores universal human fears and desires.