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.

Sabrina Ratté’s work has been presented internationally by various institutions including Laforet Museum (Tokyo), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec City), Thoma Foundation (Santa Fe), PHI Center (Montreal), Whitney Museum of Art (New York), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), and the Museum of the Moving Image (New York). Her first major solo exhibition is currently at La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris). She was nominated for the Sobey Art Award in 2019 and 2020. Her work can be found in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Global Affairs, TD Bank, Bell Canada and Hydro-Québec, amongst others.

Written by Christine Redfern / ELLEPHANT