How Rachel Rossin Took Over the Guggenheim

The Guggenheim Young Collectors Council Party is a long-running tradition bringing aspiring art collectors of all stripes, along with throngs of savvy gallerists, advisors, and the like, together in the chic confines of the museum’s iconic rotunda. The dress code for this year’s: “metallic and shimmering digital glam attire.” So, like glittering beacons through the rainy Tuesday evening, the crowd that descended on the museum emanated a pearlescent sheen fitting for characters populating the surreal, digital environment conceived by Rachel Rossin around the particulars of the Guggenheim’s interior architecture. The one-night-only installation—consisting of video projections along the spiraling parapet, as well as 10 sculptural elements and eight transparent screens situated across the ground floor lobby, plus a separate standalone three-channel video—took the artist six months to bring to fruition.

“It was like a one-night heist,” Rossin tells Family Style about pulling off the “once in a lifetime opportunity.” Her fully realized vision coalesced in the forms of eerie, distorted silhouettes of human figures, daisy crowns, glowing architectural structures, satellite images of hurricanes, and more; all these motifs were perpetually animated, reflecting the movement and energy of the guests mingling alongside them. The loose inspiration, she adds, is a “phenomenon” known as the quickening effect, which in short is how one’s sense of reality and time is distorted while living against the dizzying backdrop of technology advancing at an exponential rate.

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As The Muses DJ’ed, art and cultural luminaries including artists Jamian Juliano-Villani, Ivana Bašić, Chloe Wise, Ellie Rines, Olivia Smith, patrons Tiffany Zabludowicz and Anastasiya Siro, and Family Style’s own K.O. Nnamdie ascended the famed spiraling rotunda, flanked by Rossin’s surreal digital graphics, as if headed toward infinity.

“I love seeing people interact with it,” Rossin says of her project’s debut. “I made a virtual simulation for it first. When I get to take it out of the screen and then live in it, that's really fun. It’s like a whole video game with the Guggenheim in it.”

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The night also unveiled Tawainese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang as the recipient of the 2024 LG Guggenheim Award Recipient, part of the museum’s partnership with LG to support artists working with cutting-edge tech.