Viewing Rachel Rossin: The Totalists at Albion Jeune

A final unmissable solo show for The Wick is Rachel Rossin, an exciting young American artist based in New York who has engineered and programmed AI software to make paintings and installations, showing at Albion Jeune until June.

Rossin’s The Totalists is a fascinating confrontation with technology and tradition, between the organic and the synthetic, and what these things might mean both for painting and for humans more widely. Thinking about the ‘black box’, for example – a system whose internal workings are unknown to the user – has influenced several pieces in the show, attempts to visual the invisible structures that record and shape our existence.

There are references to VR, AI-generated patterns and traditional painting techniques, and Rossin also layers paint to emulate glitch effects and screen artifacts, while her chosen hues often remind us of the eerie glow of screens. It’s a thought-provoking exploration of what it means to create, and to resist, in the AI-era. “Art is one of the only places that isn’t asking you for your data—it’s asking you to think for yourself,” Rossin reflects.