The Last Day

Rachel Rose

A response to the artist’s daughter’s intuitive sense of loss and bewilderment at the passing of a friend, Rachel Rose’s film The Last Day (2023) consists of thousand of still photographs.

Shot in her children’s room, the stammering sequentiality and preternatural chromatic quality of the film’s individual images exposes the medium’s usually imperceptible workings. Toys and everyday artifacts found in the room populate seven days of still lifes, symbolizing the seven epochs in the Earth’s history, with each day lit sequentially from sunrise to evening. A bottle of milk stands in for the early amorphous, pre-vegetal world, a rubber bathtub toy illustrates ocean life, trucks become ciphers for late industrialization. On the last, seventh day, a large rug acts as a central protagonist, emitting increasingly bright light from integrated LEDs, ominously signaling the end of times. The work lays bare that the history of earth’s landscape—from the primordial, to the prehistoric, to the industrialized and into the near future—merely echoes the development of human imagination.

The exhibition is produced by the LUMA Arles & Google research initiative.